Great question!
We discovered pretty early on that good equipment can make or break a video screencast, and that great equipment is needed for webinars.
For some reason, people will tolerate low quality video (the early days of YouTube anyone?) but bad audio is insufferable.
If you’ll only ever have one person on your webinars, you can get away with a much simpler set up (ie: a USB mic that plugs directly into your computer) but if you plan to have multiple people in the same room on a webinar, you have to pull out all the stops.
GoToWebinar is funny about accepting multiple audio inputs so when you have multiple people in one room, you have to merge your multiple audio inputs into one using a USB mixer, which is plugged into your computer.
This is our multi-person webinar & sultry screencasting holy grail of equipment list:
Studio boom arms x 2
Audio mixer x 1
Headphone amp x 1
Mic cables x 2
Stereo cable x 1
Blue Spark mic x 2
Along with the equipment here, you’ll need some headphones to plug into the headphone amp, and a way to mount the studio foam (which dampens sound and prevents your recording space from sounding like a bathroom.) We wound up mounting the foamies on boards with construction adhesive and then mounted the boards onto the wall.
We run our webinars and demos through GoToWebinar, and record our Screencasts using a combination of Camtasia for Macto record and edit the screencasts, and Garageband to record the Audio.
As we start introducing live video in our video content, we’ll likely transition to more grown up video solutions like either Apple’s FinalCut or Adobe Premiere for our editing needs.
We currently host our videos through either Vimeo and are starting to transition to Wistia for their enhanced analytics.
If you have any other questions about our audio equipment, our videos, or anything video content related, be sure to let me know.