Gadgetory

this video is sponsored by BH hey what is up guys that could be HD here and welcome to a bit of a different type of video my working title for it right now is just all the gear so this whole thing this idea started actually a long time ago back when I was trying a bunch of different microphones there's a lot of gear on this channel as you probably already know but I was just trying a mic here I'm mic there and I eventually found the Sennheiser MKH 416 and not a lot of people not a lot of youtubers are talking about this mic or reviewing this mic so just kind of have to pop up for me and once I found and started using it I loved it it's amazing now typically with a find like this I immediately want to like use it a bunch and then turn around and review it and share it with you all but even with as many of you as our into tech how many of you are really interested in a $900 shotgun microphone like not that many so I sit on it you know I don't review it but I've been using it ever since and then this happened again with the whole process of a tripod found the sick tripod didn't really want to review it because how many people care so I've just been using it and this process has just been kind of happening behind the scenes for a while so this video is a ton of those things in one place and it's the sort of stuff that like the video nerd in me has been itching to share with you guys but that I haven't had a good reason to make one video all about any one of these items now let me just address the question right off the bat is this overkill yeah yeah a lot of this stuff is you can make great videos with a lot less than this with none of this honestly and people do every single day but for my fellow gear heads the next few minutes are just filled with tips and gear and things that apply to a very small number of people I've fully accepted that almost no one will actually watch the whole thing or care about this video but for those of you who do this is talking through all that so we can start right off the bat with this just this set right here just me talking to the camera you've seen it before some might call it a roll even a simple set like this has a bunch of stuff a bunch of gear I haven't talked about going on with it so this is that gear so I can start with the camera that's sort of the most obvious place I've talked about these before but these are Reds dsmcc two bodies a sensor phenomenal in every way like they're more camera than I can ever use but I love them to pieces and they're amazing so when I'm talking to the camera like this the lens I'm almost always using is the Sigma 24 to 35 cine that's cuz it's a sharp high-quality wide angle zoom lens that most importantly covers the full-frame monstrous sensor there's also a photo version of course and in a cine world it's a little cheaper than the competition but honestly for a lot of what I do it's actually better it opens all the way up to t2 it's super sharp I like it and on the lighting so this is the sort of lighting look that's been dialed in so the room of course is lit with overhead lights there are 5,000 Kelvin just LED overhead lights nothing special but that's just lighting the room straight down from the top so lighting me in this set is a sky panel a 60 C with a 4-foot gigantic softbox on it its massive but I've gone through a bunch of different key lights in my time and this one's turned into my favorite just because it's so incredibly powerful and very very soft and it does a bunch of other things even when it's not the key light so the C and the name stands for color and it can make pretty much any color at any intensity pretty easily it gets insanely bright right now it's at less than half brightness and it's a great key light replacing the Sun and it's also super heavy so I never really carried anywhere I pretty much always have it on wheels so this is basically a light stand with wheels on it and this is one of the themes of the studio actually it's just to put as many things on wheels as possible highly recommended there's also one fill light in this set pretty simple but it's just off camera and it's just sort of filling in general brightness of this set for this high key look and it's an aperture 300 D so it's actually this is one of the more well reviewed things on YouTube from this list you can use it with or without the light dome diffusion depending on how soft you want it to be and it is also on wheels I won't get as soft as a sky panel I used to use it mainly as a key light up at the sky panel is a much bigger source but these apertures are great value they're pretty popular for a reason and then there is audio so obviously video is only half the story audio i always under sling so the microphone is always just a below the camera right below that sight line and is this rig right here and it's pretty flexible I could put the mic almost anywhere with it but it's a mix pre 6:33 it's the only preamp / recorder I need to use it's incredible sitting on this little platform that screws into a microphone stand and holds it up so I can see it and it's connected to the mic I talked about the Sennheiser MKH 416 that shotgun I'm gonna try to link just about everything I'm talking about that's useful below if it's available online it's probably from B&H and honestly it's because the NH has been pretty much the go-to place for video gear for me and has been for a long time like since before college and they also happen to be extremely close by they're in New York City so right across the river so shipping for me is dangerously fast and the prices are great and everything and if I need something right away I've been known to just go over there and get it and there's also always plenty of staff over there willing to help out so shout out to be an H for sponsoring this gear tour video and for carrying this stuff alright so what else are we noticing in this set pretty simple back here this is what we call a little practical light this is a quasar science four-foot tube it can do RGB light it can do white light it can do all sorts of effects if you want it to it's a four foot tube just sort of freestanding there shoutout to Dave to Dee who's the first one I saw and tech videos anyway using one I don't know if he uses a quasar science tube or something else but they look great I haven't used them to light any actual subjects yet but they are awesome as practicals or backgrounds or sort of effects lights you may even remember them from the portal intro for the galaxy s10 display video oh and right off camera also here's even one more niche thing that we've used for videos this is just a BenQ desktop monitor on a VESA mount on wheels we call it Karen shout out to Plankton's girl but it's great for when we're all looking at the same view for building a more elaborate set or something we don't all want to crowd around this small monitor so plug straight into the camera via HDMI and that we can all share this monitor which is just mirroring it in the future maybe we'll get like a full on TV on wheels or something but this has been pretty great too alright then there is the b-roll which is the recording of the actual products and tech and objects instead of the people which I think I'd do a lot more of and that's actually where you'll see a lot more specific gear to do that sort of thing which brings me to my one of my favorite lenses ever actually and that would be the zeiss otus 50 five mil F 1.4 this is a medium lens it's not really a wide angle but it's also not super telephoto and it's incredibly sharp but I will say the one downside of this lens why I don't use it even more often than I do is because the minimum focus distance is a little far it's almost two feet which is much further than something like a macro lens which you can get much closer up to an object with so that's this this is my macro lens and probably my third of the big three of choice the Canon hundred mil F 2.8 stabilized macro lens so putting this thing in front of an 8k sensor will literally let you see things that your eye doesn't see and it sounds like I'm exaggerating but it's really true like I'll put a phone down or something that looks totally clean with a microfiber and then I'll zoom in for focus on this hundred mil and I'll see all these little flakes of dust and hairs and I'll have to clean it again because this picks up every little detail so this is an amazing lens for getting smaller detail shots of things like buttons or tiny objects or things that you ordinarily wouldn't notice from being further away and then my favourites slider right now which doesn't change very often I've had maybe three major full-time youth sliders ever but my current favorite is this guy it's extremely smooth which a slider should be and carries a lot of weight this is called the magic carpet pro by sirrah the rails are pretty thick it's not belt driven anymore like my previous favorite but it is still extremely smooth using what they call this fly wheel tech and then on top of all that I think I can safely call it modular which is actually pretty useful for a slider so in most cases when you're doing a lot of small objects like this you only need two maybe three feet tops of room to actually do a slide that's convincing and fun and makes a small object like this a little more exciting but if you have a bigger subject like a car for example you need much more space to do a slide like that so being able to add three feet of track and just keep adding more and more track just by popping the ends off is actually really useful and you can do that with this so that's been pretty useful as well and then a slider right now is sitting on this really unique piece of gear that will call the pedestal shoutout to John from Tod for showing me this in the first place it is a dangerous to go hang out with him and discover video gear but this thing is really impressive so I went out to shoot that auto focused episode on the Tesla Model 3 in California and when I was there I was bar this weird rolling tripod thing but it could do all these weird camera moves that I couldn't typically do with a normal tripod so if you can just imagine a tripod with wheels at each corner and then with the structure connecting it and then a height adjustable base in the center with crab steering which lets you turn the wheels and then roll on any smooth surface so it's also kind of like a slider that's what this pedestal is you've seen much bigger versions of this in like newsrooms this is much smaller because we use smaller cameras on but I've used it a couple times since I've gotten it and like very specific situations one that might come to mind is the Apple watch review there's a floating shot where I'm checking the time on the watch and walking down a hallway lose the types of shots you can't get with really any other video tool you could try it with a jib you could try it with a study cam but yeah you find uses for things with wheels like this that typically are a little difficult to come by so this is why we use the pedestal office so this really has been one of those specialty pieces of gear that you sort of figure out use as for as you go which has been pretty great but speaking of specialty yeah Mia is one of those super specialty things it's a it's a robot holding a camera and there's 10,000 things you can do with a robot that you can keyframe moves into that you couldn't do with a human so the thing about having a camera robot as you can see it's such an extreme unique tool that it is very tempting to use it all the time I've talked about this with people in text and other video makers why don't you use the robot all the time but then you kind of get tired of it you'd feel like you see it all the time and you might actually take it for granted so it's a specific challenge of mine to not use the robot all the time but when we do use it it is super cool so first of all not only is this epic w not permanently but basically all the time mounted onto the robot we also have a motorized fist system Fizz being fi z focus iris and zoom so this 18 to 35 has manual rings that the robot can also control we also have a hundred mil macro mapped the same way is that it can be controlled with the ring and just like I showed in that dope tech video back a couple years ago when we first discovered this it can be controlled using an Xbox controller and that's exactly how we do it there's an iMac over there running Windows and the motorized precision software for me to exactly dial in and keyframe the moves that we build that you end up seeing in the videos so the few times you do see a really crazy looking or interesting or fascinating move whether it's moving really fast or you get some sort of orbital rotation that a human couldn't do that's because we dreamt up the move built it using their software and keyframing and an Xbox controller lit around it flagged staged made so everything worked and then pressed record actually there's a record button in the software and made it happen and I'm really glad we have it alright so next up is the top-down set where we're at and when I say top-down you can probably picture the sort of overhead top down looking sets and as complex as those can get sometimes the actual gear setup to make them happen is pretty simple so we have the light source over here huge four foot wide Kino Flo bulbs and they're going through this white sheet that makes it a very soft light source and the camera is on this so this is a Kessler pocket jib Pro the word pocket a bit of a misnomer cuz it's kind of already huge but in the world of jibs this is pretty small actually so this is the pocket jib Pro there's a Manfrotto 502 head on it and then of course the camera pointed straight down off of that and then the rest of this is essentially light control so we can get these looking consistent in the same way every time so there's flags there's different modifiers cutting light at certain points to make it spread evenly across this surface and then the surface itself is kind of a jerry-rigged solution but it's essentially a bunch of these thin aluminum sheets that have a vinyl skin a dbrand skin on them that looks like a surface or some sort of color and we have a bunch of these this is the concrete one it's just a small area that looks like concrete when you fill it up in the frame of the top down looks like you're looking at concrete there's actually one of those simple setups that kind of applies to you know you can you can put any camera in here you can put any number of different lights in these positions but generally this rule of thumb for this simple set up big soft light source coming in on top of a surface like this just looks good alright so some other small pieces of gear one of my favorites here is this old vintage manual lens called the Helios 44 it's a 58 millimeter lens and you can't even buy them new anymore they're just secondhand in most cases it's not a sharp lens there's color fringing and tinting in various colors it's the opposite of the technical lens you're used to but what makes it awesome is it has the most spirally anamorphic looking bokeh I've ever seen in a non anamorphic lens so you'll know it when you see it it showed up here and there but it's really fun and this lens is actually really cheap it's usually like 50 bucks so it's easy to recommend then there's this weird-looking lens it's a 15 millimeter macro tilt shift lens I don't even use it for the tilt shift part but I swear to you I'm not exaggerating the minimum focus distance is literally touching the front glass so this being such a wide-angle lens makes it great for shooting inside cars and things like that where you're in a tight space and you're really close to things and then this guy here is the Canon 11 224 11 millimeters is hilariously wide on a full-frame sensor but sometimes that's what you need when shooting inside a car and this gigantic front element of course means you can't use ND filters or anything so I almost never use this lens outside but it's basically the only lens I've used to shoot the videos where I'm talking inside my car then there's a loud mics so I use a shotgun most of the time 90 something percent of the time but sometimes you do need a laugh for a collab or an interview style type of thing these are electro Sonics PDR recorders you record straight to micro SD cards and then the second cos 11 D is the name of the actual mic one for me and one for Lou or bill or Elan or whoever we need audio from for that video then this is a drone this is the DJI and havoc 2 Pro you've probably seen one of these before and it looks kind of like a baby transformer in a weird way when I hold it like this but the drone use has been limited but it's great for top downs of much larger objects like cars but I want to get better at using aerial video more in the future alright some last-second quick hitters so we get pretty good at knowing where we can take the red cameras and where we can I especially know the weight and size of it and I can do manual focus and what I can't but there are certain projects or types of things where you can't autofocus videos are number one we tend to stick to Canon stuff because we're very comfortable with the colors but their autofocus is also phenomenal you've probably heard about dual pixel autofocus so Canon c200 is the primary Canon camera we go to when we're not bringing the red around believe it or not this is smaller and easier to use it shoots to real media cards it has a real long battery life it has an EVF but most importantly that autofocus so a pretty decent amount of those car follow shots that you've seen where we're either pointing the camera out of window or out the back of a car at a moving car that's a good combination of red and c200 so thanks to c200 for that and it's got the 18 to 35 on it the photo version the Canon autofocus works pretty great with any Canon compatible lens so that's awesome and then Canon 1dx is also significantly smaller this was my only camera during Tesla's model Y event back when I went out to California anytime you see a vlog style video like that obviously it has to be an even smaller camera and also this with a smaller autofocus lens like a 16 to 35 is great for a Steadicam anytime you have Ronin s shots for example the studio tour with Lou this had a lot of shots from the 1 DX on that run and s also shout-out to this guy this is called the Westcott flex and this is exactly what it looks sounds like it's a flexible a little light panel that either plugs into the wall or can be battery-powered we usually plug it into the wall but this is what you've seen that's either added just like a splash of color or a glow in the background I'll show you some footage where that's been used and point out where the Flex is sometimes it's also even used as a fill light on my face with a bit of a warmer light since this is technically a bicolor 2 different color LEDs but the warmer ones lots is a nice warm splash or as you can see right now it can be reflective but we don't actually use it as a reflector all right I want to say this is the greatest tripod ever made but for anyone who's used tripods for a long time before you're familiar with the whole like extending the leg and re tightening it process and it's been annoying for a long time that's why I love these but the legs are called the float X 75 it's a 75 millimeter ball head so you can put any other 75 millimeter ball head on top I happen to use another Sackler ball head but the reason these are amazing is because the adjustment process is that so I mean that's basically all I had to see I saw a couple of videos about this it's of course it's a carbon fiber tripod it's lightweight there's other advantages to it but the main reason this tripod is so good is because it's that easy to adjust as soon as I saw that I got one of them and then I started replacing my other tripods with this one because of that so now it's the only tripod I use alright last but not least we have arrived at DJI Ronin 2 this whole stabilizer this whole thing this whole rigs actually just did ug I run into now I messed around with the movi for a little bit and it was great but it was a little smaller and didn't quite have the battery life I was looking for Ronin 2 has had a great battery life and of course having the whole cage thing and being able to sit it down wherever you want is great and it's super modular so we've been able to set it up exactly how we want based on what we're shooting with it so two things that come to mind we've shot with Ronin 2 number one auto focus videos as well hanging out the back of an SUV or on a track with one of these playing in at an Acura NSX that was rigged one way but it was rigged a totally different way with some other accessories when John was holding it shot up to John again from TLD when we were doing the factory tour with Elon Musk that's a totally different rig to be able to walk in and out between factories and robots moving around around you but when it comes down to it the bottom line is we use it again for camera movement the same idea with the pedestal the same idea with the slider and the whole point obviously for all this gear stuff that we've had is to be able to tell a story or show your visual and a little bit of a more interesting way now as most of it overkill yeah I just showed you guys a camera attached to a robot that does key framing moves both in the computer software that kind of stuff is ridiculous but it is way too much fun not to share so I figured I would share it with you yes so even if you're not in the market to pick up any of this stuff which probably most of you aren't I hope you enjoyed watching it and maybe you learn a thing or two if you enjoyed seen the type of stuff but this has been the gear tour thank you for watching talk to guys the next one peace but the one downside it has is the minimum focus distance is a little far it's almost 2 feet it's one and a half feet away from the lens which can make it a little tough to use for macros so I don't I mean you can get really close to subject it's basically if you can imagine yeah yeah I almost bought you