Looking for video rigs
/I went out shooting with buddy Jay Stinson today and on the way home we stopped by the downtown Vistek store, just to have a look around. As some of you know, I have been studying videography/filmmaking and I've recently been looking at rig systems for my video camera. I had seen the Redrock Micro stuff at a trade show and one of their inside sales people (Rachel) had helped me build a configuration for budget purposes over a period of several days. She was very helpful, but I have to say that picking the right parts for this "adult lego" system was pretty confusing. By the time I was done with the exercise, I sat back to retrench because the config was into multiple thousands of dollars that I don't have and cannot justify. Robert Cole is my video consultant at Vistek and he suggested taking a look at Shape products. They're made in Canada and they in fact have a complete bundle for the Canon C300. Shape is, I think, a small company, but I like the idea of potentially supporting fellow Canadians. I cannot talk to them until August 4th because they are closed for vacation, but I'm hopeful. They are based out of Montreal. Have a look at their kit here.
What was even more interesting was the introduction to a Turkish company called edelkrone. There's an accent missing on the last e so please bear with me. He could only show me digital brochures but is going to see if they can accommodate my use cases as most of what they show on their website while extremely comprehensive, is primarily oriented to having a monitor mounted on the rig. When I got home, I spent some time viewing their videos on their website. The founder does most of the presenting, and the videos are pretty well done. You see that the products are not only well built, the engineering is very thoughtful and the packaging is very lovely, very Apple-esque. If you want to learn more about this now available in Canada product, or if you just want to see some video rig kits that are incredible and priced for real people have a look here. I was particularly impressed by the thinking that went into their two follow focus devices. They are designed for the one person cameraperson/director/dp and have things like reversing gearing (to work with Nikon lenses that focus backwards) and unlike most other follow focus units are not height dependent. Very cool stuff.