What's the best setup & gear for hosting live webinars? What do you need, to ensure high quality audio, video and an overall positive experience for your attendees?
In this post, I'll show you a behind-the-scenes look at the webinar streaming setup that I currently use, after doing countless webinars and tweaking my setup continuously, over time.
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Goals of a Good Webinar Setup
Before we can talk about the tools & tech of the setup, we have to define our goals clearly. There is no such thing as a single "perfect" webinar setup. If you are on the road and portability matters more than anything else, a laptop, webcam and lightweight USB microphone may be your perfect setup. If you work from an office and mobility isn't an issue, your setup will look totally different.
In this post, I'll show you such a setup for a "fixed" or office location setup. However, regardless of your circumstances, there are a few things any good webinar setup should ensure:
- Video quality: attendees on your webinar should be receiving a clean, high quality video feed. This could be a live video feed, a screenshare or a combination of both.
- Audio quality: attendees should hear your voice clearly, without interruptions and without interference from background noise.
- Presentation quality: you, as a presenter, need to have easy and comfortable control over your presentation. You should be able to present your screen, slides and video as well as launch polls & offers and answer attendee questions. All this should happen without awkward pauses or interruptions.
The Connection Quality Factor
To stream good video and audio quality, you need to have a fast, stable internet connection. Apart from being on a fast connection to begin with, there are a few additional factors that can help you get a better connection:
- Connect via Ethernet cable: I recommend not relying on a WiFi connection and instead connecting via a cable. Even if you have a strong WiFi signal, a cable connection is still going to be faster and more stable.
- Disconnect other devices: disable your phone's WiFi and disconnect other devices on your network. If your phone starts updating apps or backing up your photos during a webinar, this could compromise your connection quality.
- Close apps: make sure to close any apps that can use up bandwidth, during a webinar.
If you need an additional speed boost and you're on a slow connection, test out the Speedify service. With Speedify, you can combine multiple connections into one "bundled" connection. In my testing, it doesn't seem to make the connection noticeably faster, but it can help on unreliable connections, because it can fall back onto the second connection if the first one fails.
My Webinar Setup
With that, let's go through the setup I use for my live webinars. Each component of this setup is made to fulfill one or several of the goals listed above. Let's go through each aspect:

2 Screens
I always prefer using 2 screens for webinar presentations. For this, I connect my laptop to an external monitor. Each screen serves a different purpose:
- Screen 1 is the one I share with my audience. This is where I show my presentation and I show how I interact with stuff in my browser or on my desktop. This is useful for tutorial webinars.
- Screen 2 is my admin/control screen. This is where I have all of my admin controls, where I monitor questions, launch polls & offers etc.
Having 2 screens is helpful for running a smooth presentation. By sharing my entire screen 1, I never have to switch from slides to screen sharing or switch from sharing one app or window to another. I simply share the whole screen and anything I want my audience to see goes on that screen.
At the same time, I always have my admin controls in view. Again, that means there are no interruptions or awkward pauses when I need to interact with the webinar tool and do things like select a poll to share.
To ensure better stream quality, I set both my screens to a 1920x1080px resolution. Although both of them are 4K screens, I use a lower resolution for webinars to save on bandwidth and processing power. Webinar viewers won't see the stream in 4K anyway, so there's no point recording at such a high resolution.

External Webcam
Laptops usually have built-in webcams, but I recommend using an external webcam for your webinar streams. There are 2 reasons I recommend this:
- Built-in webcams are often not very good (in the case of my laptop, the Dell XPS 15, the internal cam is comically bad).
- You can optimize the positioning of an external webcam more easily than the position of a built-in cam, where you have to move your whole laptop.
I currently use the Logitech C920, but don't take this as a recommendation. This cam is popular, but not without its issues. I can't make a confident recommendation for what webcam to get, as I haven't done any testing myself.
My recommendation is to avoid cheap webcams. If you spend only $20 on one, it's probably not going to be any better than a laptop's internal camera. Plus, make sure that whatever cam you get has a thread, so that it can be mounted on a tripod.
I use the medium Gorillapod as a tripod. This allows me to place the webcam close to my eye level and I can also place it in such a way that when I'm looking at my main screen, I'm looking almost directly at the camera.
Lighting > Camera Quality
The quality and resolution of live video during a webinar is always going to be pretty low. Because of this, you shouldn't get a bottom-of-the-barrel cheap webcam, but there's also no point in overspending on a 4K webcam.
A greater factor in picture quality than the webcam will be your lighting. A poorly lit scene will look bad, no matter what camera you point at it.
Here's what we want, in terms of lighting and scene: soft, direct light illuminating your face and a distraction free, non-messy background. The easiest way to achieve this is to face a window and stream during daytime.
Since that's not always an option, I use a studio light in my setup. I use the Godox SL-60 with a large softbox. This is a ridiculously good light for the price... but I don't recommend it. At least not for webinars, specifically. It's a good light, but it's big and bulky and I got it for my video work, not for webinars.
In most cases, a smaller LED light panel with built-in diffusion (or with a softbox mounted to it) will do the job just as well, without taking up as much space or costing as much money.

The Audio Setup
Audio is an important and often overlooked factor for good webinars. There are 2 issues you should be aware of:
- Bad audio is very hard to put up with. Pixelated, low quality video is not nice to look at, but also not a very big deal. On the other hand, poor audio quality can be almost painful. Hissing and static noises, audio that's too loud or too quiet, background noise etc. are really frustrating and will send many attendees running.
- Default microphones are (usually) rubbish. Built-in laptop mics and cheap headset microphones are not suitable audio devices for a webinar.
The good news is that there are many options for clean, high-quality audio and many of them are quite affordable. I'll start with the setup demonstrated in the video and then provide some further recommendations.
Recommended Audio Configuration
The setup from the video consists of a Rode Videomicro connected to a Zoom H1 recorder, mounted on a mic boom. I love this combination because it delivers unreasonably good audio quality for the price. You could easily spend 10x more money on audio equipment and barely hear a difference.
I like using an overhead mic configuration for my videos and for webinars. The overhead configuration lets me place the microphone relatively close to my mouth (rule of thumb: the closer the microphone is to the audio source, the better the sound quality). In addition, this configuration keeps everything out of view and keeps my hands free.
The In-Your-Face Alternative
A microphone like the Rode NT-USB is a good (and slightly less complicated) choice, that I can also recommend. However, this microphone needs to be right in front of your face and suspended away from any surface that you're interacting with, to deliver really good sound. It's best to mount it on a swing arm like this one.
For me, the downside to this setup is that A) my face is partially obstructed by the microphone in the live video and B) the mic and mic stand can get in the way of my hands when I'm using my mouse and keyboard during a presentation.
The Unreasonably High End Configuration
Full disclosure: I'm using a slightly different setup than the one shown in the video. I use the same overhead mounting configuration, but I use the Deity S-Mic 2 connected to a Zoom H6 recorder.
This is, quite frankly, not a reasonable setup for webinar streaming. Yes, the audio quality is better than in my recommended setup, but by the time the signal is uploaded to a webinar platform, compressed and sent to your attendees, I doubt anyone will notice much of a difference.
I have this audio gear for my videos and so I might as well use it for webinars too. If I was getting a setup only for webinars, I'd never have chosen this setup. And even for online videos, it's a little excessive...
The Room Factor
Before you spend more money on better microphones and such, invest in a noise-free, low echo environment to stream from.
Make sure to close windows and doors, to minimize outside noise and interruptions during a webinar. To minimize echo in the room, draw curtains, add carpets or throw down some sound blankets.
Your Turn
Now that you've seen my webinar setup and you know the principles behind it, it's your turn. Even if you don't buy any extra gear, what can you do to ensure better video, audio and presentation quality on your next webinar?
What's your favorite tip from this post and video? Let me know by leaving a comment below!

Extremely helpful as always, Shane. Thank you!
Quick (and probably naive) question: What’s the logic behind using the Zoom H1 with additional Rode videomicro?
I’m guessing the directional control? I would have expected the H1 to be enough.
Thanks, Colte!
Good question! The Videomicro is a mini shotgun mic, which means it records specifically audio from where it’s pointed at. The built-in mics on the Zoom H1 record much more surrounding and background noise. As a result, the Rode mic sounds much nicer in this recording scenario, where you want to pick up your voice and as little else as possible.
Great video Shane
I would like to see your travel setup. I was wondering that while you were presenting.
I also would like to hear about your background. I initially made the mistake of getting a green screen for a background. I quickly realized how that doesn’t look real. I like your background. What is that? And what do you think of backgrounds?
Hi Shane,
thank you again for your great tips around professional audience building!
Your content is very very good.
What I am really very interested in is your webinar about ‘Strategic Thinking for Entrepreneurs’ – where can I get this ?
Thank you, Lenz!
The strategic thinking webinar is available in Thrive University. You can create an account here, if you don’t have one yet.
Thank you, Shane!
I am a (very happy) Thrive Theme member and just checked the TU webinar – great!
Shane, it would be nice to see your “on the road, travel” webinar setup too since being out at things like events and doing presentations happens quite often.
How do you have two different views in each screen? In my notebook I can choose to have only the same view in both screens. Thanks
If you’re using Windows, go to “Display Settings” and choose to “extend” instead of “duplicate” the displays. If you’re on a Mac, I’m afraid I don’t know how it’s done.
It works! Thanks a lot! :-)
On my Mac, once I add an extra display, an icon that looks like a computer monitor shows up in my menu bar. If I click on that, and check “Use as separate display”, it will show a different screen on each monitor.
Btw, this works with a projector too (if you don’t have a separate monitor).
Thank you, Shane. I need to rearrange my own set-up. Perfect timing for this excellent info.
Hey Shane,
great video as always (says an eagerly waiting customer for the audience building course :) …
One question I could not find in the description is, what laptop stand do you use. I love to stand while recording as well, however, I do not have a desktop I could move up or down.
Any recommendations here?
As a portable, travel-friendly option I use a foldable stand like this one. For a home office, something like the Freedesk is even better.
Hi Shane, brilliant as usual. Just wondering why you don’t use Apple Mac’s?
I guess it’s a habit, mostly. One thing is that I’ve always been interested in the “high end bargain”. I love good tech, but I never buy the very top of the line stuff. I’m always interested in getting the thing that’s 90% as good as the best thing, but costs half as much. Apple products are basically the opposite of that. You pay top dollar for the not-quite-best product. That doesn’t appeal to me.
Love your webinar reviews and other stuff. A question: Are you still going to review more webinar software? I have a suggestion for WebinarPress (former WP WebinarSystem). It is lower priced plugin, but with everything in it
Great setup. I would be interested to know the specific laptop you are using. Also, I’d be interested to know if you prefer one particular webinar platform or software. I’d like to see your travel setup…
Hi Shane, loved this video just as I like most of your videos with rich info @ high quality. Yes, please let me know your travel webinar setup.
Thank you!
What I wanted to know was not in there. How do you connect the zoom h1 to the laptop and make the laptop see it as the audio in source?
When you connect the Zoom recorded to the computer via a USB cable, you can choose between two options, shown on the recorder: you can have the recorder be seen as a storage device, to access the files for it or you can have it be seen as a USB mic.
Shane, thanks for the cool content! You are so competently showing different aspects of your studio. That’s about the direction of view, for example. You put the camera in front of the second monitor. And your gaze is directed at the viewer. Cool! Then a microphone appears in sight. Damn, he’s hanging! And then it turns out that you are conducting a webinar while standing! I like to create videos in which I draw by hand on the tablet and it’s also convenient to do it while standing actually! And all the way I was thinking only about the sedentary option. It’s just amazing how much powerful know-how you manage to convey in one video !!!
Shane, how is the Zoom recorder actually mounted on the boom?
I have a bunch of velcro strips that I use to mount cables and such. I also use those to mount the recorder. Gaffer tape is also a go-to for improvised mounting.
Hi Shane,
Very useful information from you, as usual, thanks a lot! I am preparing now to start shooting videos on a regular basis and I’m trying to choose my setup. I have some questions for you if you’re so kind as to give me a hand.
1. What do you think about using the Mevo camera for video shooting and live streaming? If I get a Mevo, do I still need the Logitech webcam?
2. Can the Zoom H1 mic be connected to a smartphone or camera in order to capture sound for the video?
3. What do you think about using a RodeLink Lav System (wireless) for shooting videos?
4. Somebody recommended using a Saromonic Smartrig+ to plug any mic I’m using for recording into it. Is it needed in case I got one of the mic’s you’re recommending?
5. For shooting videos, how many studio lights do you recommend? Is it one enough, or it’s best to have 2 or 3 of them?
The tools I’ve asked about above are recommended on one of Digital Marketer’s articles on tech setup for video production. I’ve also read your article – https://activegrowth.com/shanes-video-resources-page/ – and I’m trying to choose the best options for me.
Thank you.
Best Regards,
Emil
1. The Mevo camera looks like a cool concept. Since I’ve never used it myself, I can’t tell you whether it would be a good choice or not, though. On paper, yes: it would replace the need for a webcam as well as any other camera used for recording. In practice, I have no idea what limitations and downsides it may have.
2. Not that I know of. It’s probably possible to connect it to a smartphone via adapters or something, but I wouldn’t count on it. You can, however, combine the audio from the H1 with a video source. This can be done in post (editing) as well as for a livestream.
3. From what I know, it’s okay. A bit bulky, but alright.
4. You won’t need this unless you’re recording with an XLR mic.
In general, there’s not that much merit in recording high quality audio directly to the camera. It’s basically not worth the trouble in many cases, because it’s so easy to combine a separate audio source in the edit or in a stream. In fact, for live streaming, there’s no advantage at all to sending your high quality audio signal to the camera.
5. I recommend getting at least 2. You want one main light (key light) to light the subject i the video. A second light comes in handy in countless situations, if you want to illuminate the background or use it as a fill light if shadows are too strong or anything like that.
Hi Shane, we are looking to send out kits to our speakers who will be recording their sessions at home. What would you suggest we buy/rent?
Interesting question!
Are you sending these out for the speakers to keep or are you looking to have one or two kits that you keep shipping around to current speakers?