Stop Wasting Money on This Useless Filmmaking Gear

as filmmakers we're all familiar with how expensive it is to invest in gear but the only thing worse than spending a ton of money on gear is spending money on gear that doesn't last over the years I've made a lot of good buying decisions but I've also made more questionable choices than I'd like to admit and this video is all about sharing some tips on what to do and what to avoid if you don't want to throw your money away because even though we all need gear in order to tell the stories we're interested in not all of it is created equal and in this one I'm going to get into six items that are complete waste of your time and cash this video isn't about me telling you that you need to have the very best gear out there actually quite the opposite because at the end of the video I'm going to go over the buying strategy that I've used throughout my career that actively avoids buying the most expensive cameras but there are a few areas where investing in the wrong things is basically like lighting your money on fire and I want to help you avoid that pain so let's get into it so let me start you off with a story about one of the dumbest ways I've ever tried to save money on gear years ago when I bought my first Cinema Camera a secondhand Sony FS S 5 I maxed out my budget on the body a few lenses and the best shotgun mic I could afford then almost as an afterthought I threw in a few extra accessories like HDMI and XLR cables to connect my mics and monitors to the camera a month or so after getting it all in the mail I got my first major job which was a series of interviews for a huge International NGO I packed my kit feeling like a big-time Pro and drove out to the first location on the outskirts of Mexico City where I was living at the time and got it all set up and looking nice and speaking of locations I should probably mention again why I'm sitting out here in the forest one more time in case you missed the last few videos I'm actually shooting a TV show in the Canadian Arctic for the next couple of months so I'll be away from my normal office setup until then anyways uh back to the story the director then gave me the thumbs up and we started to roll but about 10 minutes in I started to hear a weird crackling sound through my headphones since everything was basically brand new I figured it was just a monitoring issue or something with my headphones so I just kept going but after the shoot wrapped I got an email from the client telling me that that crackling sound was there the whole interview and the main shock gun track was essentially useless they were understandably pretty angry with me and it probably goes without saying I never heard from them again eventually I figured out that the issue was actually with the super budget XLR cable I'd used to connect my boom mic to the camera but by then it was way too late I figured that since I'd bought a nice shotgun I could save a bit on the cabling but looking back that's sort of like putting a $20 lens on an Alexa or cheap tires on an F1 car it just doesn't make sense since then I've always invested in professional quality cables whether they're for audio or video transmission and I had highly suggest you do the same thing at best cheap cables are a waste of money that are just going to end up in a landfill within a few months or maybe a year or something at worst they can ruin your shoot and make you look like an amateur something that isn't a waste of money though is the sponsor of this video audio but more on them later the next piece of gear that is absolutely a waste of money in my opinion is another one that I got burned on personally last summer I shot and directed my first feature documentary and since I had an ACB cam shooter with me the whole time I decided that along with my main shooting camera the fx9 I'd rig up my fx3 as a runand gun camera for him to operate or for those times when the fx9 was just too big and heavy to carry around the only problem is that I only own One camera monitor my small HD 502 that I've had for over 5 years now and I needed that for the aam so I decided to try and save a bit of cash and go with a budget option from a company that I'm not going to name just because I don't want to throw shade on any specific manufacturer but needless to say it was a disaster the number one thing I need from a monitor is reliable Focus p and I found out right away that this is something cheap monitors don't do well they might do a really good job of marketing all the fancy functions like false color and Lut support and all that but when it comes to actually using the thing in the field to frame and compose for me by far the most important thing is focusing and the budget option failed big time for me it was such a problem that I actually ditched it completely and just went with the tiny built-in screen on the back of the camera it's that much of a deal breaker for me so yes it's entirely possible that you might find a 7-in ultra bright monitor out there for like 10% the cost of the small HD but in my opinion it's not what you want and you'd be better off saving your money for something decent down the road the next thing you might want to save your money on I'm going to add here because it's the kind of thing you might be tempted to pair with the cheap M and those are off-brand batteries to power it batteries for camera gear can be insanely expensive and the Anton Bower Titan batteries that I use are almost $1,000 for two plus a charger which is ridiculous I know but there's a reason that highend batteries cost so much and that's because not all batteries are created equal far from it without going into the weeds here offbrand batteries get the price down by using lowquality cells which means they don't hold charges as well their lifespan is super short and they tend to overheat now overheating is a huge issue especially because it can add to the overall operating heat of your camera and a lot of mirrorless cameras shooting 4K or 8K are already prone to overheating so that can mean that your rig is going to shut down in the middle of long runtime Clips like interviews for example there's not really much more to say here but I'd personally rather have four highquality batteries than 10 off-brand batteries cuz they're going to last much longer they're going to hold a charge better and not end up in the dump 6 months from now there's lots of places to save cash but batteries are not the place speaking of saving cash that's the perfect opportunity to talk about a longtime sponsor of the channel and that's audio as a filmmaker and because of this YouTube channel I'm constantly in need of highquality royalty-free music for all sorts of things over the years I've tried pretty much every music service out there but I always got got annoyed with paying 200 bucks a year or more but for viewers of this channel audio is offering a year of their Pro Plan which includes thousands of royalty-free music tracks and like tens of thousands of sound effects for about a quarter of the price if you use the code Luke 70 you're going to get a full Year's membership for just 59 bucks which is an insane deal you can even lock down a lifetime membership for $199 by using the code luke1 199 which is literally the same price as most of the other services charge per a year I even scored a short film with nothing but audio music so it's it's not just for YouTube either so check out the link in the description and use the code either Luke 70 or Luke 199 depending on the option you go for and save yourself a ton of money while supporting this Channel at the same time all right back to the video when it comes to cheap pieces of gear that are a total waste of your money one of the worst offenders for me Isn't just useless it can actually ruin your footage to give you a bit of context when I switched over from photo to video there were a lot of things that I didn't really understand like why variable and D filters were so essential to video shooting so when everyone told me to get one for my the SLR kit I was shocked by the price tag and I thought there was no way I was going to spend hundreds of dollars on a filter in still I pretty much never needed filters so I just bought the cheapest one I could find on Amazon and thought it would work big mistake big mistake big cheap filters do really horrible things to your image like adding strange color tints or even like that big x pattern of contrast right through the picture to the point where it's actually unusable the first time I took my cheap variable ND on a job I learned this the hard way when I got back and tried to edit footage that had a massive green X through every clip there's no post- production workaround that exists at least not that I know of and so just stay away from really discount filters there's a lot of good brands out there uh the one I'm currently using is this one which is the niss true color um I like these ones cuz there's very little color shift at all that I've noticed the main reason I like it is just this little metal rod that you can screw on so you can uh adjust the filter by touch so with gloves on and stuff it's really easy it's kind of a dumb reason to like a filter but honestly I don't see this out there very often and I absolutely love it I use it all the time so n True Colors they're great there's lots of other options out there whatever brand you pick just make sure they're wellmade enough not to wreck your shots and that doesn't necessarily mean just buying expensive ones there's at least one extremely popular brand out there right now that's not cheap at all but still throws all sorts of green tints on the picture that I would personally not use so when it comes to Quality filters price is in everything thing again I'm not here to blast any specific manufacturer company so I'm not going to name them just do your research and make sure you aren't going to ruin your footage before you buy something all right the next thing I'm going to suggest you not waste your money on is something else I didn't really have to deal with as a photographer but that became so important as a doc filmmaker and it's a specific piece of grip equipment since I was working as a photo journalist before I became a cinematographer I really never used flashes or any kind of lighting so there wasn't much need to go for grip gear but these days I'm constantly using lights and boom po and diffusion panels and flags and all sorts of other stuff that need to be held in position on big sets we'd normally just use SE stands for all that kind of stuff but because dock Shooters need to be mobile and need gear that can be checked on planes SE stands are usually way too big and heavy to be practical on most jobs so we're forced to use light stands and a lot of the time there's nothing sketchier than a $1,000 light fixture sitting on top of a stand that looks like it might Buckle at any time now it's a fine balance here because at the same time you don't want to have to carry around those massive light stands that are so long you're never going to be able to pack them into normal duffel bag but you also don't really want to be going with something that's going to tip over in a light Breeze not only do you risk smashing whatever you mount on it but you could potentially risk legal liability if you hurt someone when it falls for me a good light stand should be able to hold at least your key light with diffusion or a boom pole with a shotgun mic on it safely to be useful so skip those super cheap stands that come in sets of two for like 35 bucks on Amazon because they'll either break fall or just be so flimsy that you'll never feel comfortable bringing them on set and then they'll end up the dump in 6 months all right the next thing I want to touch on isn't about an external tool used to achieve a specific effect it's all about what you do with that footage once it's captured tell me if this sounds familiar to you at some stage in your career maybe you've just gotten into shooting video and bought a camera you start practicing and maybe working on your first short project when you notice that your laptop is starting to fill up so you start looking around on Amazon and find a 1 tby SSD drive for $39.99 or something crazy like that the last piece of advice I'm going to give for today is to please please please not buy it in the digital age hard drives are often the only place your footage I.E your life's work as a filmmaker exists and even though storage is getting cheaper and cheaper when it comes to your archives you do not want to go cheap hard drives fail in fact last month there were a ton of Articles out there that exposed the ridiculous failure numbers on the SanDisk Extreme Pro ssds which were and probably still are one of the more popular drives out there and if a drive from a major manufacturer fails enough to be pulled from peda pixel's recommended list then you can only imagine the you're taking with a no-name brand I get it hard drives are expensive but the only thing worse than spending money on them is plugging yours in one day only to realize that a Year's worth of work has just vanished you hear those geese that's not a good sign that means that Winter's coming fast there have been geese flying overhead all day and they're leaving us soon we're going to be buried in snow winter is coming okay back to the video you should always have two copies of your work anyways but sinking your money into knockoff hard drives is just almost always a bad idea it's like buying a nice car and then putting a battery in it from Dollarama it's going to make everything unreliable and it's not going to last because at the end of the day this just isn't about trying to build up a high quality kit so you can have confidence in it as a professional though that is a massive benefit of not wasting your money on stuff it's also to stop the cycle of consumption and pollution that comes from buying cheap electronics and then just throwing them away to buy more cheap stuff buy nice or buy twice is true in most areas of film making gear but when it comes to the six things I mentioned in this video it's especially true instead I suggest saving money on year by buying used high quality stuff I personally have only ever bought one new camera in my entire career my first Stills camera was used my first Cinema Camera an fs5 was used and so is my fs7 and so is the fx9 I use now the only camera I ever bought new was the fx3 that I'm using for this YouTube channel and that's only because when I needed it it was so new that there were no used ones available buying used lenses is also a great way to save cash and all but one of the sigma primes I use were bought from Facebook Marketplace sure you do need to do your D due diligence and make sure that everything works but in the decade plus I've been doing this I've never really seen a camera hit its runtime limit and stop working I just did a quick check on eBay and you can get an fs7 body right now for 1,200 bucks and even though that's a pretty old camera at this point I used it to shoot multiple Netflix shows so it's still more than good enough for professional work today there's a lot more life left in most quality gear than we realize and for me that's the way to save cash while still getting things that will work for years but skipping on the stuff I talked about today will almost always be a bad idea and I think you'll be a lot happier if you just don't do it see [Music] you

Channel: Luc Forsyth

Views: 59,870

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Id: -_uL6K7jBEs

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2023