Gadgetory

what's going on guys J is two cents here bringing it a video about the camera gear that I plan on taking to CES and I think you guys ought to be interested because fundraiser will pretty much pay for it so don't go anywhere please alright guys well here she is and if you've been following any of my social media for any length of time specifically Twitter or Facebook you would know that my Canon t2i is on its last Lake it needs a major service and unfortunately the service is just about the same value of the camera itself so it made no sense to service it even though it has served me so well you guys are probably looking at this and going that is a bit overkill for a YouTube channel and you are absolutely right this is not needed for YouTube channel whatsoever but if you have a true passion for cinematography like I do I love making videos and not just YouTube videos but what I've been doing for a long time since I was a little kid is making home movies like Star Wars action movies and special effects and things like that and if you guys remember back in the very first day I started this channel I made reference to a previous visual effects stuff I used to do on YouTube I love cinematics I love short movies I love special effects and so I wanted to build a camera that not only appeals to YouTube in terms of tech and bring you guys tech reviews and stuff I also still want to be able to make movies for me to just enjoy having the fun of doing filmmaking and I'm very very amateur at it but it doesn't change the fact that I love it in fact if I could go back and change my career guys the only other thing I could imagine myself doing with a true passion and true love for it would be a director of photography for Hollywood I mean screw being in front of the camera screw the actors the gear the equipment to set up the just pulling the focus and the dolly rails and all that stuff it just that is what I love about moviemaking and this sort of does that for me in a DSLR trim all right so enough about that the hunk of meat on here is the Canon 70d I chose the Canon 70d because it's got the same processor that the 5d Mark 3 has and that's a $3,500 body and I'm you get this body for $1000 I happen to get the kit which included the 18 to 135 lens the basic lens and there's nothing fantastic about it for about $1,400 so yeah it's still a lot of money but it's a great great step up from the Canon t2i have that is pretty much on its deathbed now I love the 7d B it's got all the functions that my t2 I had with magic lantern but stock firmware so I need to investigate whether or not magic lantern is even going to be worth it on this camera because it just gives me so much functionality I absolutely love this camera and everything about it so far and I have nothing but great things to say about it now I'm not going to do review of the camera because I would not do a very good camera review that not what I'm geared towards so I'm gonna talk more about my rig now everything else you see on here is pretty much a hodgepodge it's all put together through eBay and Amazon and stuff like that because I just cannot afford the name-brand stuff have you ever heard the name Redrock micro you would know that that make PC gear look like chump change so pretty much everything I've got on here is like a knockoff of Red Rock micro people most of it is pod kadhi pea vodka is like a Chinese brand but they make some pretty good stuff and the tolerances are really good okay so PS productions baseplate adjustable up and down that's what I like to buy it most base plates are just kind of static but this one goes up and down so I can line it up with the matte box without having to move the matte box up and down which is nice speaking of matte box this is a pro Wayne matte box it's about 200 bucks it comes with all the adjustable rings on there so that you can fit it around your lens nicely blocks all the Sun out it's got true ND filters in here 4x4 filters that I can install in there so if I'm shooting outside I can block off the Sun and still maintain nice depth of field and low f-stop settings without blowing out the entire image it does have the you know the barn doors and stuff that mount on there that are adjustable up and down you know and all that so I can block the Sun for outdoor shooting clearly I leave them off indoors because they don't get a whole lot of pull out of Sun in here if I did it would sure help the lighting situation now the rails that these are mounted on again are vodka rails is your 18 inch rails they're a little bit long for handheld so I have some shorter rails for handheld the actual C bracket right here this is a podcast mm again with the handle on the top and this is pretty invaluable too when it comes to being handheld at CES is is having a way to actually hold the rig and as you can see right here I just you know I just took it off the tripod and you can you can hold the entire thing together you know hold it right there and get nice low angle shots or just maneuver the rig that way my cameraman is going to love that he's actually my brother-in-law so it's not like I'm paying for a cameraman I pay him with starbuck he he's gonna appreciate that because last CES he had no way to actually handle the rig and so getting it up and on his shoulder and off his shoulder and stuff was actually a major pain in the ass on this side here we've got the D focus it's actually a local brand the company that makes D focus is right down the street for me superior follow focus to the one I had last year very smooth it's adjustable the tilt and the height of it and everything so it fits on there perfectly it's got this giant knob right here that's adjustable so that I can get it on and off quickly and then the sound is being recorded right here through as you can see my zoom h4n through XLR cable which is running to the mic is just off-camera my mic is a sennheiser e83 five fantastic mic it's only a hundred bucks dynamic so it doesn't require any sort of phantom power which means the battery life on the zoom lasts a heck of a lot longer than if I was running something requiring phantom power so with the rails came this silly little lever here but this lever here is really silly it just just mount on pretty much with a giant rubber band but it's it's really difficult to get into a just focal length with all this gear on here so this handle makes it very easy just go up and down as you can see the lens is moving in and out and you can kind of see up there on the tablet you know I'm zooming in and zooming out speaking of the tablet is being held on there with an 11 inch magic articulating arm so I can just loosen this thing up and then I can move this around you know lock it down wherever I want which makes magic arms magical yeah so obviously that is a camera our brand again amazon love Amazon the nice thing about having the tablet Mountain on here with just it's just a cheap little plastic tripod mount thing I got ebay for 10 bucks and then I got a a Manfrotto mounting plate for it and it threads on to the arm and it holds my tablet up here it's already broken once and I super glued it back together that's just how cheap I am and then I've got a USB cable running from the camera to the tablet now the tablet software I'm using is called DSLR controller it allows you to control everything about the camera from right here in the app in fact if you look carefully up there you can see as I'm talking the audio meters move blah blah blah bap bap bap bap see now I know if I'm not if I have an audio miss happen I'm not capturing audio it's moving right there I mean that is cool it gives you battery life on there tells me my ISO settings my f-stop settings my frames per second I can adjust everything my Kelvin temperature rating my manual focus auto focus histogram I mean everything you could possibly need e I mean there's my color histogram it's all handled through that as an app that cost $7.99 if you've got a DSLR and an Android you need to go buy that app and I don't get anything for that that's just the coolest freakin app ever and the cool thing about that app when I turn the camera off you can see that the app goes away see now we're back to the android screen but when I turn on the camera its hands-free it's going to immediately go right to the DSLR app and boom even if the tablet was turned off and locked without a passkey of course you can get right to the app so there's that so that's pretty much all there is to talk about with the camera rig I also got a new tripod as you can see right there and very nice sturdy legs actually is rated up to 20 pounds this is an e image tripod a true fluid head now the other tripod I had was an FM 18 from ebay or naive AM and not a true fluid head which made pans very difficult because it would have hang up points where we kind of slow down or skip and it made pans very very difficult they weren't smooth you know so it's got true a knob on here that you can turn where it gives me true actual resistance in the panning and the tilting and stuff and as you can see right here see how I pushed itself back that's because I've got it set to remember the position that I was in so if I wanted to do a nice slow tilt I can just let go of it it's going to go right back to where it was and it's going to stop I mean that is freaking cool and then I can also adjust the resistance of it so that I can you know it pretty much will stay anywhere I put it I mean it's like set it there I'm sure most tripods would just look and fall forward and want to break the camera so that is no longer an issue I love this tripod all right so enough about this why don't I go ahead and convert this over to a shoulder mount so that you can see how it's going to be utilized at CES and then I'll show go and show you guys my new slider I picked up as well that's really going to help with a lot of the b-roll footage here so don't go anywhere okay so this is not exactly how it's going to be in when it's shoulder mounted there's a couple of changes I still have to make one thing I want to point out is the 18-inch rods that I'm using right now are too long to be able to get your face anywhere near the back of the camera so I'm just too lazy to switch them all over to my 10-inch rods for handheld but you guys will get the basic idea now if I can get this around here without hitting my mic wow that's perfect you can see right here we've got long 18-inch rails here I've also got this four pound counterweight that actually gets mounted to the back of this thing to counterweight the the weight of the camera and the pivot point for that is obviously the shoulder now I'm not gonna mount this on here now because there's really no point to it but yeah you guys pretty much get the idea now when it comes to shoulder mounting it go ahead and get this thing off of here and there you go you guys could pretty much get the idea now as I move over here so the zoom isn't going to be staying right here it's going to actually move to the other side more towards the back to give good counterweight but one of the other things that's going to be happening here is I'm actually going to have a really nice high quality eye Cup on here for a viewfinder that actually has a diopter so that you can get it set to your vision and your wear if you wear glasses like my cameraman does the last thing we want is him focusing for his vision rather than you know a true optics so this is pretty much how this works handheld but as you can see you've got the handles on there you've got the nice comfortable shoulder pad and this is actually not very bad this is not difficult to hold it's very very very comfortable so there is the rig right there in its handheld format I think you guys kind of get the idea okay guys here's my t2i and here is what it is doing for me today now what it's setting on right here this is actually a very Vaughn 800 slide cam slider with a cheap generic ball mount for my Canon t2i now this is my Canon t2i and it's my ultrasonic 28 to 130 millimeter lens it's not great it needs a service it's very grindy what I turn it but the cool thing is now I can get those really cool perspective changes when I'm doing my work and as you can see it's just sliding on my slider here now it's got a little bit of movement when it's on this this tripod this is that FM 89 shinned earlier which is not a true fluid head but you know what it gets the job done for me nicely and I love this slider it's a true ball bearing it rolls so smooth I mean look at that if I just if I just barely move that it slides by itself and just to kind of give you guys an example of what this is if I was to turn this on right now I'm just going to take just a little a little footage here with the slider and set this up get this all in focus here at the point where I want it focused I'm going to give you guys a little demonstration of how the slider works so if you just kind of push that in you get the idea it's actually quite the art to get good at sliding I mean sliding I'm learning right now just to move this at a constant smooth rate it's hard so I'm thinking about actually attaching some some pulleys on this because this is designed to attach pulleys where I can crank this and then it will you know pull a cable and it'll it'll go and that's a lot easier to maintain speed on than sliding this with your hand but because I have the ball mount on here as you can see I can just move this around however I need then I can do sideways shots or you know push ins or pull outs like I just demonstrated that's going to make doing b-roll and stuff a lot of fun but at the same time a lot of work there's a lot of work actually goes into getting that b-roll stuff so guys there you go that is the stuff that I am using now to bring you the content that you see and prepare for CES for running and gunning so it's called when you carry a camera with you and stuff yep it's not like when the model does this thing I'm not going to do another Arnold voice for a while but anyways there's my equipment guys you don't need this kind of stuff though to have a successful YouTube channel there's plenty of successful people who do it with nothing more than a Logitech c920 webcam in fact there's quite a few videos I did in the past where that is that is uh what I was recording on and some of you may be wondering now what am I actually recording this on if the other cameras there and the t2 eyes here it's actually uh actually my brother-in-law's t3i which I've been using as a backup to Kin to keep the channel going and thank you for letting me borrow this thing for a long extended period of time because that's what's kept things going time to get the heck on out of here guys it's going to be the weekend by the time you guys see this and as always follow on Twitter ask me any questions you got about this check the description for discounts as well as links to all of the stuff that I'm using here and catch you guys in the next one