Expensive Cinema Gear That's Worth Every Penny

I recently did a video where I talked about very inexpensive gear that was nearly essential to have your kit I'm of the opinion that less is often more but more with less often translates to having what seems like a very expensive item but speeds up your workflow and allows you to work more efficiently think about it if you have a piece of gear that allows you to get better shots or more creative shots then you might get higher paying clients on the post- production side if you had items that sped up your workflow and saved you hours and hours of time then it probably would save you a lot of money so expensive gear not always mean something that's really expensive hurts your wallet and you're screwed forever right it might actually be an investment in yourself and your career and your own time so today I'm going to be talking about a few items that I was very hesitant to buy just because of the price tag associated with them but ultimately Prov to be a very good purchase because allowed me to do better work and speed up my workflow so let's get into it we're going to talk about expensive items it is worth every penny all right first item I've seen a few videos of people talking about this item and there's a reason this is the flow Tech tripod basically how this works is it has a single lever system so all you got to do is push one in and it expands all the way out and then back in so you are able to deploy this thing incredibly record time I have done quite a few documentary shoots where we shot everything on tripods it means you have to react incredibly quickly and this thing right here is the only reason that that was possible if every single time you had to move with a character or change the height of your tripod and you had to screw unscrew six different things six different legs or even latch six different legs and then move it around you just would have missed a shot but with this tripod the levers are right where you want them to be they're right at your arm level hand level and it can just fly up and down like that and you can get shots that you were not able to get before again this is the flo te tripod from stackler it's over 1,000 bucks I've seen a few other cam manufacturers C being one of them that have put out H triod that has a similar mechanism as the flow tech for quite a bit less money so that might be a good route if the Sackler is out of your price range this is the flow Tech 75 worth every penny sticking with gear that allows you to get shots that you couldn't in any other way it's every YouTuber's favorite piece of item the gimbal now the gimbal in my opinion is incredibly overused but there's a reason for that this allows you to get shots that are not possible for this amount of money and wen't even possible less than a decade ago I remember when I just started filming I rented a moi M5 one of the first usable gimbals on the market that was doing a higher end shoot for Marriott hotels and I wanted to get that extra Sheen by renting that item to create this beautiful motion allowed me to get higher and higher paying gigs from that same client and other clients as well that was 78 years ago and now gimbals are pretty ubiquitous but they're still one of the only ways that you can get this type of shot outside of a steady cam for a few hundred bucks you can buy a pretty nice gimbal I have the RS3 Pro here I like the pro a lot because I often use a C70 on it and it gives me obviously the extra clearance that the rs2 or other gimbal manufacturers do not allow and so it is worth every single penny keeping with onset production stuff this is the small rig 450 it's not the small rig specifically that I think is worth every penny though I do believe this one is it is just having one great really bright light having a single bright light allows you to do a lot of different things No Matter What scenario you find yourself in whether you're battling with some light streaming in through a window or trying to light up an entire room having one really bright light will allow you to do that and actually control your lighting a little bit more than you would otherwise and to go along with one really bright light it's also nice to have one giant diffuser or softbox to go with it so that you can create different looks that have the big aperture domes in order to get a big soft light for an interview or just to fill up a room for a dock shoot the reason I got this one specifically is it actually has more power than the aperture 600 for less than half the cost so check out the small rig this is the 450d and it is bright next on the list we have the aperture bulbs this is the eight bulb case and these are just little light bulbs that you can replace in lamps and use as practicals either in your shot or just to enhance a practical light for example but what's nice about these is they can do a lot more than just that they also are completely rgbw so they can create any color in the Spectrum and so they're really useful for different effects as well the music video for Aro McKinley for example I just used one of these in the back seat and put on the police as he's driving around town and it looked like he was being chased or followed by a police car also in a recent documentary that I shot called King Cole there is a shot of a girl looking at fireworks but she wasn't the on the day that we actually shot the fireworks and so we use these to fake fireworks by just holding a couple coup of these not too far from her face she looked in the sky it had the firework effect so not cheap you can buy them individually so if you just wanted to test out one or two they're not that expensive but because they have been so useful in so many different situations these bals have been worth every single penny and have enhanced my work and what I do this next item I wouldn't call super expensive I think for what it does it's actually fairly inexpensive because of the time it saves you but these are the tentacle sinks you've probably seen these around found they are just little boxes that send time code and sync time code to all your different devices so here we have the s1h and the s1h does have a Time code you can just stick this sucker onto your rig stick in the time code and it will sync to whatever other tentacle sinks are running at a time for example with your sound bag you can just stick that onto your bag run it into the 3.5 and suddenly these two cameras are synced with just a couple of these and and that saves you oodles and oodles of time in post production I shot a whole documentary where I had multiple cameras multiple audio folks on a few days and sinking that and post was awful and frankly impossible if I would have had these it would have saved me an insane amount of time therefore these are worth every single penny I use them on every shoot that I do that has multiple cameras or uses a separate sound recorder so get two three four of these and you will think yourself later one other item that I don't have with me right now is the tentacle think track e it actually functions very similar to like a road Wireless GoPro 2 that can record into itself it has a lavalier uh connector so you can put a wireless lab onto it so it can record to itself in 32-bit float and it syncs to all your other devices I've used these in situations where we've needed to mic six seven or eight people and we're only running you know four or five regular Wireless Labs sck a couple of these on there it's sync to all your devices SN tier recorder SN tier cameras the tentacle syn track key and then just the regular tentacle sinks are just 100% worth every penny speaking of post-production once you've synced everything you want to make sure that you actually can edit what you're doing it's just not worth the pain and the hassle of having your post- production be bogged down by transfer speeds and drive speeds so one of the best purchases are any small ssts I know the sandis have had some issues lately with some recalls but I've never had any issues and what I'll often do is I will take my foot back it all up on a large raid and then I will put the stuff I'm editing at the moment on these drives they're fast they're quick edits back smoothly I'm really looking forward to whenever they have more affordable 8 terab ssds cuz I often find that 4 terabytes is not enough so ssds worth the money so last on this list is a bit of a new product but gives New Life to so many great cameras that is worth mentioning so Canon a few years ago was one of the first to put out a rear ND adapter which is basically just an adapter from EF to RF mounts that you could slide an ND filter in the back and it was a variable ND it allowed you to go from two to seven or eight stops which eliminated the need for front screw on NDS or mat boxes which are both C in a pain in the butt that MD filter wasn't rap but it definitely turned a switch for a lot of other manufacturers out there who started making versions of rear filter adapters and they are awesome the first and probably the best and most expensive is just breakthrough filters these are for PL Mount and they make different mounts to go onto a bunch of different cameras what I love about these is not only the build quality but also the MD filter that comes with it is just one of the most beautiful pieces of equipment it's 1 to 11 stops which is unbelievable you don't have to think about anything you can just take a lens off stick a lens on even the case that you've te it on I mean you could probably throw this thing around the room and the indd filter would be just fine and then the one I want to talk about which is definitely quite a bit cheaper than the Breakthrough filters is the Mage rear ND adapter it has just a really nicely made wheel good hard stops this one has interchangeable mounts on the back which the Breakthrough filters do not you just buy a little ke- mount adapter for 20 bucks and suddenly you have your L Mount can change into e- Mount or can change into RF Mount so if you have a PL mount lens like this Atlas rery here you just stick it in there and good to go you shoot and now you have internal NDS on your Panasonic s1h it makes life just so much easier especially when you're changing lenses often or changing primes I highly highly recommend getting something like this so This gear isn't essential I mean outside of a camera a lens and a microphone no gear really is but for me and the consistency that I work and the work that I do this gear has helped speed up my workflow and for me has been worth every single penny so that's it for this video all the links to these items are in the description below so take a look and see if maybe they'll work for you and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Curren Sheldon

Views: 42,511

Keywords: filmmaking, filmmaker, youtube, documentary, doc series, cinematography, cinematographer, film, DP, creator, film editing, #cinema, #films, #art, #director, #movies, #movie, #photography, #filmmakers, #cinematic, #shortfilm, #setlife, #camera, #cameragear, #video, #videoproduction, #gear, #hollywood, #cinephile, #actor, #behindthescenes, #indiefilm, #independentcinema, #directorofphotography

Id: bROpvxFCsVA

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2023