So I’ve been wanting to add a section to go over this stuff for a while now.  You know, to show you all the tools we use to bring you such masterpieces, and to review new things as we add them to our shooting rig.

Well as of now it isn’t anything fancy.

Basically we use a Canon HV30, which is a HD camcorder that produces a great image with a little bit of knowing and practice at a really good price point.  I picked this one up for about $600.  Not too steep in the video world.  I would definitely recommend it to somebody looking to get into video but not wanting the spend all that much money.  The downsides are the lack of physical manual controls and XLR microphone inputs like those on Prosumer cams.  These shortcomings make achieving your visual goals a little bit trickier as you need to go through the menu to control shutter speeds, aperture, white balance, and focus.  Also the lack of XLR inputs means you need an adapter in order to utilize pro microphones.  We currently use a Rode VideoMic, which is a good entry level microphone, and runs about $149.

Those are the most important pieces of equipment we have, other than support and matte boxes.  We a pretty basic set of sticks (tripod) and a shoulder support to make run and gun shooting a little bit easier and steadier.

What’s coming next?

Rode NTG-2 – Pro level shotgun microphone.

Juicedlink – This is a low noise preamp that increases signal to noise ratio as well as creates an XLR input to allow use of pro mics.  This combined with the Rode NTG-2 will definitely increase our sound quality.

Ikan Vh-7 – An external monitor to use to help find critical focus while shooting.

But these are just tools to help tell stories, so make sure that your story is good without dropping a bunch of cash to make a shitty story look good.  Like what we do.