Studio 8 : walkthrough

Hi there!

Im going to do a quick run through of Studio 8 from virtualstudiosets.com.

Studio 8 has 12 different camera angles, and loads of different ways you can customise the set yourself.

Lets take a look at the wide angle first.

The desk is removable, so you can use the set with real furniture or for standing talent. There’s a screen area on the front of the desk where you can put your own video or programme logo. The screen is removable too if you don’t need it.

There’s a panel at the back of the set, with two screens for your own content, each one is removable – and there’s a separate coloured surround, that you can turn on or off, or adjust the colour. There’s a pelmet at the top of the window too – that’s a separate layer that you can also adjust if you like or turn off completely.

The window itself has a separate glass layer, and the vertical window frames themselves can be removed too. And obviously you can change the skyline to whatever you like.

The neon lighting strips are a separate layer – you can turn that on and off, or change the colour.

The light-boxes themselves have even more colour control – they’re actually made from two separate layers – the bottom layer comes supplied as a deep blue – I’d suggest keeping that for your base color – but you also get this extra highlight layer which is cyan – so when they’re both showing you get a really nice convincing blue colour. You can get some nice effects by changing those two layers. If we keep the base layer blue – but make the top layer more towards magenta you get this really nice, realistic looking lighting effect. Notice how everything gets reflected nicely. If your brand colour is orange, say – then you could try setting your base colour to red, and the highlight colour more towards yellow to get a really nice realistic orange colour. It’s up to you really, you can play around and experiment, or turn them off completely if you want.

You get exactly the same lighting control on the desk light-boxes which also have two colour layers to play with. you get some subtle light spilling on to the floor too.

All of the other angles have the same layers available when they appear in shot.
Let’s take a quick look at the different camera angles. You’ve a mid angle, a mid left and right where the desk is still visible (although you can still turn it off if you don’t need it), there’s a tighter left and right shot – you could maybe also use these as a standing position with a single screen. You get a centre position for your main presenter, and also a slightly offset version, left and right – for when you just want presenter and a single screen perhaps.

You also get a set of MCUs – these have got some depth of field added to give you a much more realistic close-up. Remember if you’re adding your own skyline as a live input within TriCaster or vMix, you might want to blur it first to match. But if you don’t want to bother with that, you also get a duplicate set of close-ups with no depth of field just in case.

Like all our sets, you can get a complete Photoshop version for each angle, plus every layer saved out as a separate lossless PNG image with transparency – you can load PNG’s into most graphics or editing packages. If you’re using a TriCaster, you can get a special version already set up that you can load into NewTek’s Virtual Set editor. vMix users can get pre-made vMix Virtual Sets ready to run. These do come with some layers merged together, so the colours are as you see here, but you could also use the Photoshop version, where the layers are all separate, to create your own variations.

Anyway – there it is – that’s Studio 8. As always – if you have any questions, please do get in touch.