Been meaning to get round to it for a long time but will try to review all the equipment that we use for TV production.
Narration (known as "Afureco" in Japanese which is short for "After Recording") for Culture Japan Season 2 is done in my office. For the pilot episode of Culture Japan Season 0, we used a studio in Roppongi who charged us 200000 yen for using their facilities - and for only a few hours!
My production budget would run out pretty quick if we carried on like that so decided to do it myself.
The voice actress for Mirai Suenaga is UTACO and we regularly stream our recording sessions from the studio on my Ustream channel - you need to keep an eye out on my Twitter or Facebook as broadcasts are spontaneous - yesterdays broadcast below.
After looking around for a decent mic, I came across the Blue Snowball microphone - pretty much decided to get it based on YouTube reviews and sound samples. Got mine from Amazon for 7480 yen.
The first mic I picked up initially was this Samson Meteor Mic - but it was a dud and just didn't work. Luckily Amazon has a great returns policy.
How many of you work in video production?
Before I get more reviews out, for the time being you can see some more of my TV production environment in the earlier Japan TV Production post.
BTW, are you more of a gadget person or figure person or both or neither?