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Comment by inamberclad | Hacker News Reader

How did he spend $20K on film equipment? A few pro-grade tripods and a solid camera shouldn't be more than a quarter of that.

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Some of the cost might come from buying a computer suitable for video editing, which I can imagine could be a couple of thousand dollars.

Exactly. SSD storage alone can cost $5,000+. A nice camera is around $2,000 and lenses around $1,500 each.

Oh yeah. I have been producing content full-time on YouTube for nearly 7 years. I have two NASes, each with ten 18TB HDDs and an SSD cache, plus a separate all-SSD DAS that has ten 4TB TLC NVMe SSDs. Video storage is a significant cost that people frequently overlook.

And we edit on two M1 Ultra Mac Studios, as well as M1 Max MacBook Pros, all fully-optioned.

People vastly underestimate the time and expense involved with “just posting videos to YouTube.”

(If it’s such easy money, why aren’t they doing it…)

I'll post this as a reply to your comment because I think other people will have this concern when it comes to content creation.

You do not need a really beefy computer to edit videos especially when you're starting out. A Canva Pro subscription is a couple of hundred dollars and will let you upload all your footage and then edit it within the browser meaning you don't need to have a powerful computer. If you grow your channel and your needs change then just cancel Canva and buy that bigger machine you need. Use your phone or something on the cheaper end (of cameras) like a GoPro to record.

i had no idea that canva did video as well as images. would you call it having all the basics or are there noticeable features missing compared to say Screenflow?

I’ve never used screenflow so I can’t talk about that but in terms of features Canva has everything I want as a very amateur creator. The elements, animations and transitions are all easy to use and work really well out of the box. The preset elements and designs can help speed up videos too since you don’t need to find stock footage or gifs elsewhere, just search in Canva.

thats actually awesome. ill have to give it a shot.

"pro grade" cameras are at least ~$2,500 (say, a BMPCC) plus a another thousand or so for each professional lens. Storage media, monitors, lighting, stands, audio, and more and it eventually adds up.

You can spend US$5 pretty easily on one very good tripod (but something enough for this kind of production $2K would be fine). For a decent mirrorless camera you're looking at $3K body only, so then you have to think about lenses, B cameras, rigging, lighting, etc. which all adds up. Good audio equipment is expensive too, so I think for the size of the channel here, $20K is a pretty moderate spend.

He has multiple cameras, some of them mini ones for attaching to models and putting them underwater:

https://brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com/2022/09/12/my-c...

He's also in Finland, so the cost of gear might not be as cheap as in the US.

Perhaps the $20,000 he spent on film equipment helped propel him to 2.9 million subscribers, 705 million video views, and $664,000 total earnings by allowing him to produce a grade of video that is better than other lego videos on YouTube.

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