Smallrig video gear
I am and will most likely always be a photographer. I don’t find shooting video appealing, and it is not something that I enjoy doing but it is something that is often requested by clients. Usually, I tend to send my clients to trusted videographers as I strongly believe in specialization. You can’t be a master of many skilled. But at times this is not always possible and at times like these, such as on tour with bands, or in places where access is limited to a few people, I have to assume the role of photographer and videographer. In the past, I would try to do a video with the cheapest and lightest options available to me.
In the beginning, shooting with a gimbal and then a DJI Osmo Pocket was fine, but as more people adopted these tech items into their everyday life, clients became less happy to pay someone to use them. But in the beginning, most people were very happy with what I was using to shoot video with.
Shooting video with a phone and gimbal seemed like a no brainer to me, the mobile phone had good video quality now, some phones like the LG V10 had great video features and allowed things like monitoring audio so that is what I did. I combined the LG V10 with the DJI Osmo Mobile and used it a lot over a few years at festivals.
I shoot the graffiti festival “Meeting of Styles” in the Philippines in 40 C degree heat and the mobile phone handled the hot weather better than more DSLR cameras did. I was happy with the video that the phone captured with the gimbal at the time. But now most clients want 4K and shooting at 1080p on a mobile phone and a gimbal will not cut it anymore.
Going with the Italian band to an interview after their set was complete. I used a mobile phone and the DJI Osmo Mobile again for this. Perfect to handhold for 10 minutes.
But times change and video is becoming more and more important so I have to change how I do video now. Many clients are requesting 4K video now, with good audio and a Mobile phone, and Gimbal simply doesn’t cut it anymore with clients so It is time to upgrade my video gear.
When it comes to shooting video, I don’t want to be gear swopping all the time, my main camera needs to do both jobs from now on but luckily for me, the Nikon Z6 is a perfectly fine video shooter so I did not need to purchase a new camera, all I had to do was modify the way I used the camera. Enter Smallrig. I saw a few Chinese videographers using Smallrig with their Sony cameras and it looked very interesting to me. Kind of like the DIY hacker methods that hackers and builders have with raspberry Pi computers so I decided to look into the system and got lost down the rabbit hole of accessories and choices a person has when building out his own kit. This is maybe the best part of Smallrig. Build your own kit, almost like Lego when I was a kid.
The camera cage is the heart of the Smallrig kit. You will build everything off the cage.
The basic building block of any Smallrig system is the camera cage. The camera cage is where you start your system and you add attachments to it as you. The cage that I got was for the Nikon Z system and it is fairly well made. It is cast and milled out of a type of aluminum and feels strong enough to take a few falls The cage is attached to the camera at two places on the Nikon Z body. The first is the tripod mount, similar to the way L-brackets are attached to the camera. The second connection is to the camera lug. This was a little more complex to attack the cage to the camera as you have to remove the small camera strap lug but it is not very difficult to do. Once the cage is attached to the camera at those two points, it is fairly solid but some people have said online that the cage can rub up against the body at some points during use and scratch the body so I did take some precautions and apply a skin to my Nikon Z body to protect it. I don’t sell my cameras after one or two years, I use them until they die, but I still think it is important to look after your gear as much as possible. Your camera is a tool, but your tools should be respected.
I usually use an L-bracket on my Nikon and I was hoping that the Smallrig cage could replace the L-bracket.
The Smallrig cage can’t be used as an L-bracket when shooting stills. I was hoping that the bottom of the cage would at least be mountable into a tripod but it is too large. But the cage does have a lot of mounting points so you can use tripod mounting plates on the bottom and the side of the cage to make your own L-bracket but it is not the most comfortable thing to carry around with you when you do it. It would have been great if the Smallrig cage could have done double duty and replaced the L-Bracket completely. That would have made life much simpler for people who do stills and video. As it stands right now, I have to decide what I want to do when I go out, Do I rock the L-bracket for stills or the cage for video. As someone who is moving more into hybrid shooting for digital, this is a pain. I know I am nit-picking but as life gets more complicated, having simple solutions would make life much better.
Smallrig has so many different handles to select from, I choose this version as it has a cold-shoe built into it and a lot of mounting points for future expansion.
The first accessory that I bought was the top handle. Carrying the cage with the handle on top is very comfortable and it does allow you to move very quickly with the camera and maintain stability. I really do enjoy this accessory, especially once it is combined with an external screen. The handle fastens to the top of the cage with two simple screws. It is quick to install and feels solid. There is no wobble or play with the handle and it feels really solid and strong. If you are carrying around a lot of expensive gear in a cage, you really want to have a lot of confidence that the cage will not break or damage your gear.
The side handles that I chose were the more minimalist versions that Smallrig had to offer. I wasn’t crazy about the wooden gripped handles they had on offer.
Extra cold-shoes that I purchased to modify my side handles.
The modified side-handle with the cold-shoe attachment on top.
The next accessory that I added was the side handles to the cage. These side handles should in theory make the camera easier to hold when shooting longer scenes. This is primary for festival work that I do and I might be required to shoot a whole set for a band. In the past, I used to use a monopod to help with the camera weight but I am really trying to reduce the weight of gear that I take with me to festivals now. I chose to go with the all-black handles purely as they seemed more professional and not so avant-garde to me. At work, you don’t want to stand out, you simply want to get the job done. The handles attached to the cage with relative ease, once again you simply use an Allen key to attach the handles to the cage and they feel rock solid and comfortable in the hand. Structurally they are great but I did find two small issues with them that I didn’t consider when ordering them. The first is that they hand no cold-shoe mounts on the top, but this was easy to correct with two small cold-shoe attachments. This is the strong point of the Smallrig system, you can modify it to suit your own needs. But the second problem is much more serious. If I had a handle on the right-hand side of the cage, I can open the memory card slot of the camera but I can’t remove the memory card. This is a big problem and I am not sure how to solve this yet. It is not the end of the world if I am shooting all day and I only offloading data at the end of the day but my work follows usually has me editing during the different band sets at a festival as I usually have to send my work to publishers by 1 AM the next day, so having to dismantle a part of the cage setup every time I need to ingest some footage will be a pain in the ass. I will play around with these handles some more in the future and try to find a solution. As I have said before, the best thing about the Smallrig setup is the customization options you have at your finger-tips so I might be able to hack something out in the future that will give me access to the memory cards.
The biggest problem that I have right now, I can open the memory card door but I can’t remove the card and the memory card door does not open all the way. There is no way to take out the card or insert a new card.
Moving on from the Smallrig gear, the next thing that I have added to my setup is an external monitor. Now, if I had gone with something expensive like an Atmos Ninja with external HDMI Recording, then that might have solved my small issue with the memory access that I am having but I didn’t want to layout that amount of cash for something that I will not be using a lot. Stills photography will always be my bread and butter. I never want my video work to become my primary income source and I have no desire to be a videographer. For the bits of video that I do, all I need is an external monitor that can help me with my composition and focusing when I have the camera in a cage, so I bought the Desview R5. This is a 5″ monitor that I can mount on the side of the top of the camera, and it is easier to look at quickly compared to my camera screen. I haven’t used the monitor a lot yet. I simply bought it, turned it on, and set the menus to English. In my quick test with it, the Zebras seem to work well, I enjoy the focus peaking and I like the fact that I can customize the interface and turn off things that I don’t really want to use, such as scopes. A simple histogram is good enough for me. I know there are a lot of extra features for this monitor and I will play around with them and maybe do a full review of the monitor sometime later in 2021 but it is early January now, so things are slowing down in China and there are no shows to shoot with the fear of the Covid-19 virus outbreak having a second wave here.
The last bit of tech that I bought was a new microphone. This is not very exciting, just a bog-standard Rode Videomic go. I usually record audio with my Zoom H6 or get an audio recording from the soundstage at the festival. The microphone will mostly be used for interviews in the future. I want to try and interview some artists(not just musicians) this year in China so this might come in handy.
The small rig kit at the moment but I might change it in the future as I use it more and find out what works best for me.
My gear setup has changed a lot for 2021, my everyday carry has completely changed, my video setup has had a huge overall and the last thing I need to change is my work gear. I will do that one next but I will have to wait until after the Chinese new year before I start working on it. I am considering retiring my beloved Nikon 3DS even though she still purs like a kitten in the pit and spanks all my other cameras when it comes to autofocus in the dark with strong backlighting. So perhaps I will buy a second mirrorless body to go with the Z6 but I need some time to think about this. My workhorse of a lens, the Nikon 80-200 f2.8 is on its last legs now. I really need to replace it, but I am also not sure what I will do. The Sigma 120-300 f2.8 is really intriguing, but I need to think amount lens mounts now. If I switch completely to the mirrorless setups, then maybe it will be better to slowly increase the number of Z lenses that I have, and purchasing a new Nikon Z 70-200 lens and a teleconverter makes more sense. But each Z lens that I buy, is a lens that I can’t use on my film cameras. For some people that is not a big deal, but outside of work, I don’t really shoot a lot of digital stuff. Luckily Chinese new year is in the middle of February so I have about 5 weeks to think about these issues and I can also see what is happening with the Covid-19 virus situation. There is no point to buy new gear to shoot at work and then I have no work in 2021 because of the virus. This blog seems to be going off at a tangent here so I will call it a day for now.
If you have any suggestions for me on the video gear or even on how I should change my work setup, drop me an email. Sorry, but I can’t allow a comment section on the website as it is too easy for me to get into serious trouble in mainland China. So all comments have to go to my email while I live and work in China, I am solely responsible for all information on my website, so a user comment on my website can get me into a lot of trouble with the local police.
Enough rambling for today.
Shaun.