One of the best things I did early in my career was to make sure I always had a dedicated workspace at home. It meant that I could work on projects, study, and experiment on my own equipment.
Over the years my setup has evolved as pieces of kit have been swapped in an out, but the core is that I have a standing desk, a good chair, and plenty of screen real estate. The lower-tech aspects of my workspace are equally important, shelving for books and records that have now followed me around for two decades of adulthood.
Table of Contents
Video
- Canon Rebel SL3, 18-55mm f1.4-5.6
- There are many digital cameras, but this one it mine. I originally chose it because of its on-board USB output which means you can skip the capture card and get a clean feed directly from the camera.
- Pretty cool, right? The only catch is that the video is limited to 576p30, which you don’t notice until you take a still photo and view it at 2k or 4k resolution. Then you ask, hey this is a digital camera with a big sensor that captures enormously large raw photos, why so smol? Turns out it’s usb 2.0(!) and therefore limited on how much data it can transfer.
- With the limitations of USB 2.0 established, we can move on to what the camera is connected to.
- Elgato 4K Capture card
- This is plugged into the mini HDMI port on the camera and into a USB 3.0 hub, and onto the computer. Elgato makes great stuff, this is the second capture device I’ve used of theirs and they’ve both worked flawlessly in both windows and mac. I’m sure linux is it’s own special hell with these things, but you get what you’re paying for.
- dedicated USB 3.0 hub - This is really important. The capture card transfers a lot of data and is picky about what it can be chained through.
- In a previous iteration of my setup I had a monitor with an integrated usb 3.0 hub, which I learned didn’t have enough bandwidth for 1080p60. So I shopped around until I found a hub that had enough bandwidth and an ethernet port.
- This hub goes directly to my macbook pro for exactly two things: camera signal and ethernet. Because I only need 1080p60, the addition of gigabit ethernet doesn’t cut into the bandwidth needed to do video.
- However, wired ethernet makes for more consistent call quality! An absolute must-have if you take lots of calls and want to have good video and audio.
- I’ve since introduced a TS4 hub to run 144hz video out from the macbook, which also has an ethernet port. I had been using that until it had a day of intermittently dropping video signals, bad enough to where I unplugged it. It was running hot so I left it unplugged for the weekend. It was fine when I set it back up the following Monday, but I intentionally did not run ethernet through it, figuring that it wouldn’t hurt if it were in fact a thermal throttling issue impacting the video signal. It’s been fine ever since so I’ve left it be!
- Bonus, the USB hub has its own power adapter and can power the camera rig through the phantom battery.
- Elgato key light
- Yeti Blue Mic + Yeti Mic Arm
- I’ve seen lots of criticism of this mic but I’ve only ever received compliments about its sound quality. I don’t podcast or post videos to social media, so I cannot judge it for those uses. But in the land of work-related video calls, it’s an excellent option
Audio
- kbear in-ear monitors
- I find that I only use these if I need to be on calls for more than an hour at a time, otherwise I use Airpods.
- Airpods Pro 2
- The previous version were not good enough to be my daily driver, but the second (non USB-C) generation was a signifcant enough improvement to use for most of my calls day to day. I only need to remember to enable Focus mode to keep stray phone calls from interrupting me.
- KRK Rokit 6 powered studio monitors
- KRK 8” subwoofer
- Traktor mixer + audio interface
Desk
- 2” walnut butcher block top, 35” x 60”
- Uplift standing desk frame
- Desk riser holding many USB hubs
- Reading stand / laptop holder
Displays
- LG OLED 45” ultrawide
- LG 32” 2k, vertically oriented
Computers
- Work machine: 14” M2 Ultra Macbook Pro. Had the opportunity to upgrade, took it.
- Gaming PC: AMD 5950x, 32gb ram, Nvidia 4090, 8tb ssd storage
- Server PC: Intel i7-6700K, 16gb ram, 12tb RAID disk storage
- This is a Ship of Theseus pc build that’s been running in some form since 2009. The motherboard, main SSD, and Ubuntu install date back to 2016, the spinning metal is from 2018, and the processor was bought used on ebay in 2019. There’s also an optical drive for backing up dvd’s and blurays.
- I am also stubbornly letting this thing run until it doesn’t. It lives to store files, get backed up, and do some light video encoding for plex.
- Backup NAT: Synology 18tb disk storage