What You Need To Make Travel Videos

So you've probably watched cool cinematic travel videos on YouTube and found yourself wondering, what do you need to make videos like that? Well, I'm a travel filmmaker and in this video I'm going to go over all the filming gear that I've used in the last five years, starting from my $80 GoPro knockoff to a gimbal-stabilized DSLR, so you can learn from my mistakes and my experience and get a better idea of what you really need. Let's do this. So I'm like a monkey stand right now. Hey guys, welcome to my channel. My name is Nadir and I mostly make travel vlogs and travel videos on this channel, but occasionally I make a helpful video like this one. One of the most common questions I get on my channel is people asking what kind of gear I use, or more importantly people asking what kind of gear they should get if they want to make travel films. Now the answer to that question is really complicated and depends on a lot of things like your budget, your travel style, and your needs for making a video. In this video I'm going to go over all the equipment I've used in the last five years, discuss their pros and cons, and the price points so you have all the information you need to make up your mind for yourself. So without further ado, let's kick into it. I'm going to add timestamps to this video because this is going to be a really long video so you can skip to the segments that you think are most interesting. I've been traveling since 2011 on and off, but I didn't really start making travel videos until 2016 when I had my first ever smartphone, the Galaxy S7. This thing allowed me to take good quality videos from my phone. Before I knew it I found myself taking these short clips of cool things at sea on my trips to Bhutan and Japan, and I just posted that on Facebook. I wasn't really planning on being a YouTuber ever. But then in November 2016 I went on this trip to Mexico with my ex for the time, and we planned on doing this snorkeling tour with wild sea lions. I figured that this would be a really cool chance to make a video. My first thought was GoPro. Looked up the prices. At the time, the latest GoPro was a GoPro 5, and that was like $450. That's not money I just wanted to spend on a one-time thing. And I found this knockoff GoPro called a SJCAM 4000 for $80, which only filmed in 720 pixels. But at that time I didn't even know that 720p was bad, and I was like, okay, this will get the job done. So I got the SJCAM 4000 and recorded the whole thing, and then I came back and started editing it on Windows Movie Maker. And I think that's the point I realized how much I love the process of video making, and I knew I had to make more. So the next video I actually made was in February 2017 when I did like a four-day trip to Mexico City, and I whipped out my Galaxy S7. And this time I bought some accessories too. I had these like little things you can attach to your lens, fish eye or a macro, so I was like experimenting with that. I got a two-axis gimbal from FeiyuTech for I think less than $80 or $90, which almost like broke down halfway through the trip. So if you're going to get a gimbal, I would recommend investing in one that's decent and looking up reviews on YouTube before you buy anything. And I also got this drone, which was the crappiest drone ever. It was the Parrot Bebop, if I remember right. It cost $200, plus another $300 for a Skycontroller. And it came with all kinds of problems, like my drone just deciding to run away from time to time and me chasing after it. But it got the job done. I got some sick shots of the pyramids in Mexico City. I got a really fun video, I tried vlogging for the first time. But you know, even then I started to appreciate how powerful these things are. So if you're really on a budget and you're trying to find out what the minimum is for you to make a good film, this will do it. This is an art form. Your ability to tell a story will always be greater than the gear you're using. So after that video, I started looking into how I can make my video qualities better. The first option was obviously to get an actual GoPro instead of just that Chinese rip-off camera. So I ended up getting the GoPro Hero 5. I ended up getting this gimbal for my GoPro called the Removu S Gimbal, which was a very solid investment. So for my next trip to Costa Rica, which was I think in May or June of 2017, I took my gimbal and my GoPro and my phone. I spent four days hiking volcanoes, riding on horseback, and doing a bunch of crazy stuff. And then on the last day, jumped off this waterfall with my GoPro, and I dropped it. Losing all my footage for the whole trip. That's how I learned the hard way the value of backing up your data every day. My mom felt so bad for me because I was so sad after that. She just ended up buying one and like sending it to my place, so thank you mom for that. I had sort of got the feel of shooting on this GoPro gimbal action and I realized how fun it was and how cool and cinematic the videos looked. So in September of 2017, I went again with the same gimbal and a new GoPro to go test it out. And then I came back and I started looking at my videos and the audio was just garbage. The motor noise and everything else on the side just made most of those videos unusable. So that's when I learned the importance of using a proper microphone. So at that point I had a pretty decent setup. I had my GoPro for underwater stuff, a gimbal to get this nice cinematic smooth looking b-roll, and my phone and a $10 lapel mic to get all the audio and the crisp videos I needed. And that's the setup that I used for the next couple of trips. Indonesia, Thailand, and China that December of 2017. Then again on a couple of trips to Mexico early in 2018. But this was a pretty solid setup. Some of the videos I made in Indonesia are some of my favorite videos I've made. But if you were to invest in a gimbal these days, I would say get a good phone and invest in a gimbal for that. Because phones have become so good and at the end of the day, the biggest advantage with a phone is that it's in your pocket. The moment you don't have that option, the moment you have to pull out your camera from your bag, you're gonna miss a lot of shots because you had to spend that couple of extra seconds taking that camera out of your bag. One of the things that I did while going through my Galaxy S7 and GoPro phase was I got a new computer which was a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 I think, which cost about $800 at the time. And it had 16 gigs of RAM. Before that I was using a $200-$300 laptop. If you're not picking up on the trend, I really don't like spending money on things unless I absolutely need it. So I got this $700 laptop to edit my videos in Premiere and that was a bad decision. Because this $800 laptop or $700 laptop did not have a designated graphics card and that slowed down my editing process so, so much for the next couple of years. But either ways, I was starting to learn to edit on Premiere. I was taking a couple of classes on cinematography. That's when I started to realize that this GoPro and phone combination, as good as it was, definitely had its limitations and I could use a real camera. Finally, in March 2018, I got my Canon ATV. And this has essentially been my main camera for the last 2 years and 11 months now. It can shoot 1080 pixels at 60fps, which means you can apply slow motion to it. And it's just such a solid camera, especially if you're a vlogger because there's like a flip out screen. This camera is meant for vlogging, although the new 90D, which is slightly more expensive now, is a much better camera. And if you're buying a new camera, you should definitely get the 90D, not the 80D. But this was 2018 and the 80D was hot and that's what I got and I'm very happy with it. It was time to get my first ever lens and I ended up getting the most popular lens out there. The Canon Nifty 50, 50mm f1.8, which means you got a really shallow depth of field and you can get some really, really crisp shots with some really nice background blur. Took it out to Santa Monica and realized this is a terrible option. So a Canon 80D has an APS-C sensor, which means what you see is sort of like a crop version of what you'd see in a more expensive full frame camera. And a 50mm lens is already sort of really zooming into the subject. You add those two things up, you ended up getting a crop that looks like this. This is me with my hands stretched out as far as I can and it's impossible to vlog on this. And it's not just that. Even if I'm trying to get a shot of something far away, it doesn't have image stabilization so it ends up being a really shaky shot and it just gets very hard to use. And in came the Sigma 17-50mm, my lens for the next almost three years, I want to say. I was using this up until six months ago. I also got myself a nice little GorillaPod. I don't want to say it's the only tripod you need, but it's probably the only tripod you can fit in your luggage if you're traveling as extensively as I do and are trying to pack everything in on a carry-on. And I had a Rode microphone that I usually put on top of here, but it's on top of this camera that I'm filming with right now, so I can't show it to you. But these three things together were basically my setup for the next two and a half to three years and it does the job pretty well. It's got this nice wide lens so you can see almost all of my body, not my whole body, so it's not like a proper wide-angle lens. And it can also zoom in real quick to get shots of things that are kind of far away while maintaining that nice blurry background in the back, if you can see that. Around April 2018, I sort of knew that I was going to be traveling a lot extensively for the next year or so. I started my first trip, filmed three vlogs in Italy, Slovakia, and Germany, and then I didn't film anything from June 2018 till December 2019. I was trying to do so much, the backlog of videos that I had to edit ended up overwhelming me, and I just stopped doing it completely. I was just burned out. But anyways, back to camera stuff. Were those one year and four months a total waste where I didn't film anything? Absolutely not. So while I was traveling, I was still traveling with this thing, even though I wasn't filming with it. And I was taking a lot of photos with it. So in those one and a half years, I sort of refined my color grading skills and composition skills. And then in December 2019, when I started filming again for the first time, the difference was extremely noticeable. If you go back and see my Guatemala vlog with the volcanoes, and then go back to see the one before that, which was in Germany, filmed a year and four months before that, there's a very noticeable distance between those two clips. At the end of 2019, start of 2020, I ended up going out and filming a bunch of vlogs and just other cool videos in Central America with this setup again. And then 2020 happened, and I moved to Hawaii. I just continued filmmaking more than I ever did because I didn't really have a lot to do. And this was sort of my escape from all the craziness that was going on. So I started just doing solo hikes by myself and filming it and putting out a video like every one or two weeks. And then on one of these hikes, I lost my Galaxy S7. This is not my copy. And I ended up getting the Galaxy S10 last summer, which is such a powerful phone. You can buy these refurbished for around $450 in the US. It's got so many cool features. I mean, even the older phones have 4K shooting, but this has sort of image stabilization as you can record. It has this like wide angle recording thing that it does using these three cameras at the back, which like blew my mind when I first got it. And it's just such a solid phone. I know I can make better videos with this Galaxy S10 right now than I could have with this camera maybe two or like maybe even one and a half years ago or something like that. I was also filming a lot with my GoPro Hero 5 and I ended up losing that one too because I dropped it while I was trying to do this video while I was surfing. And I started looking at what's available in the GoPro market and turns out they haven't really made a lot of progress. Back in the day, every single new GoPro was making a lot of advancement. And with the 5, I want to say they were really, really good. And it was hard to make something that was a lot better and still the size. And I know the latest one is slightly bigger, but it wasn't that much better. So I thought about it for a while and I just ended up getting a GoPro Hero 7 while the newest one out there was a Hero 9. I honestly would have gotten the Hero 5 because if you have a camera or even if you have a good smartphone, the only times you're going to use this is when you're doing water sports like surfing or snorkeling or if you're doing some sort of hike in Hawaii where you need both your hands and your legs and this has to be attached to your chest or your head or something like that. So last summer was not a good time to be an electronic item that belonged to me. But I was having a lot of fun making these videos and I knew I wanted to take things to the next step, try out something new. So I got my first ever gimbal. This thing is cool as f**k, gets everyone looking once you use it and it definitely gives you smooth footage that you want. But it's a pain in the ass to set up. This is the Zhiyun Weibo S which cost me around $430 and I think it's the best gimbal in its price range. And it's honestly the best gimbal on the market unless you're trying to get something for a camera that's heavier than this 4 to 5 to 6 pound setup. Then you need to go for something better and more powerful like the Ronin-S2. It can do a lot of cool stuff like this and get some cinematic buttery smooth footage. See that? There's cool stuff like the Vortex Smooth 2 which I was using in my last couple of videos when I was doing the Bangladesh Rondaka film. So this thing gets the best over cinematic b-roll. But is this always a good option? Absolutely not. This whole camera-lens-gimbal combo weighs about 6.5 to 7 pounds depending on what lens I'm using. And this can get really tiring, especially tiring if you're vlogging several days in a row. And usually you kind of want to hold your gimbal or your GorillaPod out here so whenever you're vlogging, the person or the viewers can see your face and what's in the background. So for the first half of the day or the first hour or so, I'm usually holding out my gimbal like this. And then an hour in, I'm sort of like bringing it in, supporting it with my elbow against my waist or something. And then after that, I'm like using my other hand to hold up my elbow so I can have the strength to lift this up long enough. And it's also a pain in the ass to disassemble. So suppose you're in the middle of the hike, you got some good shots, after that you need to disassemble this thing to put this in your bag because you know, you can't walk around with this thing when you need both hands for a hike. So you got to take it off. And the moment you do that, that means the next time you put it back together, you got to recalibrate it again, which will take like a couple of minutes. Better than a lot of the other gimbals out there as this can kind of be fitted with something kind of compact and you can sort of take out this bottom part. But it stops being that compact when you add this additional part to it, which I needed to attach my mic to this whole thing. And this cost another $30. And then there's the fact that if you're attaching your camera to a gimbal like this one, this is pretty much the only sort of stand you'll be using for the rest of the day because you have to attach your camera to this plate at the bottom. And if you want to unscrew this, let's say you want to attach this to a gorilla pod, you need a screwdriver or a coin, which is what I use to take off this whole thing and put it on again and then recalibrate it. And it just takes forever. After doing the last five or six vlogs with my gimbal, I've really started to rethink when I need a gimbal and when I don't need it, unless I'm 100% sure that I'll be doing a lot of cinematic shooting with my camera. I usually don't use a gimbal anymore because you can do a lot of little stabilization hacks by using a strap and just, you know, there's like little tricks you can do to make shots look more stable. But when you do that, you have your camera available, you can put it in your bag and it just adds a lot more flexibility to moving around with a camera. Oh, another annoying thing, you can't even use the strap with the gimbal. I have to get this other separate strap that I can like, you know, clip on and clip in that I'm sort of using on my camera right now. I am definitely going to keep using this because the cinematic shots that I get with this thing are just priceless. But I'm also very careful about when I set this up because like I said, this is time consuming and it has caused me to miss a lot of shots that I would have otherwise gotten if I was just using a gorilla pod. I started to realize my lens, the Sigma 17-50 had a massive problem. Can you hear it? You hear that loud autofocus noise? That can ruin a whole cinematic sequence and I didn't really pay too much attention to this until I started really working on sound design last year. There were so many shots that had unusable audio because of this loud cranking autofocus noise on this Sigma lens. So if you want a lens where you're going to put a shotgun mic on top of your camera and you're going to try to make a travel video, I would advise against buying this lens. Although it gives you a very sharp picture and gives you like quite a wide range of focal length, the noise is just terrible. So that was the point I decided to get my next two lenses, the Canon 10-18 wide angle zoom lens and the Canon 18-135 super zoom lens, which has become my primary lens that I've been using. If you're buying lenses, you can buy them used from a refurbished seller for like 30% off. This thing costs $350 new. I think I got it for like $280 refurbished. This thing would have cost I think $330 new. I got it for $230 refurbished. The 10-18 wide angle would have cost around I think like $280 new. It cost me around $230. So you can save a lot of money while you're buying lenses as long as you're willing to buy them used. Just make sure you're buying it from a trusted seller. Don't get it off of eBay, off some sketchy guy without any reviews because that's how you get it. So now let's talk about the 10-18. It's really good in the sense that it's got such a wide angle lens. The 10 is like really wide, but you can't really use that because if you're looking at this, my hand looks like 20 times bigger than my face. It's only maybe like 6 inches bigger. So it adds this weird distortion that makes it almost unusable. The range that I prefer to keep it is around like 15. That way it's wide enough to where I can like stretch out my hand. I can cover like a reasonable amount of my body, but not too wide to add this weird sort of distortion. But, you know, I'm not the biggest fan of this lens. The lowest aperture this can get to is I think an f4.5. It's terrible for low light shooting. And my biggest issue with this is that, you know, shooting with this 70-15 Sigma, even though it was loud, got me used to having this nice bokeh in my background. I'm not a fan of how you don't really have that with this lens. So it is an essential part of my kit now because my other lens that I'm primarily using only goes down to 18, which is not that wide. And sometimes you need those wide shots and that's the only time I use this. But I am looking to upgrade to another lens. Might cost a little bit more, but will allow me that extra bit of light and that extra bit of background blur that I love in my videos. That makes cinematic videos look that much better. This is the Canon 18-135. It's a lot like the Sigma. This one goes down to 17, this goes to 18, which is very comparable. Although that last bit, that last 1mm does matter. So when I stretch out my arm on this one, I'm still getting kind of like a cropped image. So I really have to stretch out my arm all the way. When I get it to the widest setting, I get this nicer background blur than I got with the 10-18, which is what I'm a fan of. At the maximum zoom, you can really go 7 inches from my face and you can like see my teeth. But I love this lens. And this is primarily what I use and what I will be using for a while. Okay, so I'm going to take a slight break from talking about cameras and lenses. About 6 months ago, I got the Dell XPS 15. It has a 4K screen, 32GB of RAM, finally a designated NVIDIA graphics card with 6GB of RAM, and 1TB of hard disk, which I think is too small and I'll have to buy like an external SSD hard drive. This cost me around $2,100 with a lot of discounts. And I think this is the best investment I've made in the last couple of years, hands down. It's reducing my editing time and just smoothing out the workflow by so much. Really allowing me to do more because I'm spending so much less time on the little things on editing that really shouldn't take that long and the rendering time is down by a lot. So if there's one thing you can invest in, do it on a laptop. These things should last you forever. I do get insurance on this stuff in case it gets stolen. I have insurance on all of this too, I'll talk about that in a second. Another very important investment is the Mavic Air 2. So the first drone I had, I crashed it a bunch of times and although I got some epic crash clips from that, I was so scared after that drone, it just left a bad taste in my mouth. I didn't want to get another drone and then finally, like as some cash laying around, I was like, okay, I'm going to get this thing. And this has been an absolute game changer. Good cinematography is being able to show the same things from multiple angles. This really enables you to do that. This thing can like shoot 4K, 60fps, has active track, which is the biggest reason I recommend getting this over a Mavic Mini 2. What I'd really recommend is getting it with the combo pack, which I got, which gives you two more batteries, which you're absolutely going to need. Drone shots have been the common denominator in every single vlog or travel video that has gone viral for me in the last six months or so. The issue with this is though, it can be tricky to travel to a lot of countries with drones. A lot of countries will have very strict regulations on what you can bring. Some countries just won't let you bring any drone at all. Like don't try taking this to Egypt or, I don't know, Bangladesh, let's say. Even when you can take drones, sometimes they only let you take a drone, which is under 250 milligrams. This thing's 570. And the only drone that will fit that 250 milligram mark is the Mavic Mini and the Mavic Mini 2. The Mavic Mini 2 is also a very solid drone. It can shoot 4K. The biggest problem for me with that is it doesn't have active track. You can't really let it take over with artificial intelligence and let it film you, which is something I like to do because I like to walk around and have my own drone film me without having me being on my remote while I'm filming it because that doesn't look cinematic at all. Mavic Mini 2 also doesn't have any sensors. I cannot tell you about the number of times I would have crashed this thing if it didn't have a sensor in the front and the back. The only other drone that I think can compete with this thing, at least in the Mavic series, is the Mavic 2 Pro, which is a much more expensive version of this and does offer better video and image quality. I don't think I've ever seen a video online and gone like, oh, that's Mavic 2 Pro because the Mavic Air 2 can do that. At that point, to me, you're sort of nitpicking. It does have more sensors, which is good, but it also is an older drone. It has less range than this drone. It has less battery life. So the Pro 2 has, I think, like 27 minutes of battery life. This is 35 minutes. Even if I'm not going to be able to take my drone on to countries I visit in the future, I'm going to try to do what I did in Bangladesh, which is I will collaborate with someone who works with the drone and then get those drone shots that I like because it really adds a new dimension to your videos that you wouldn't have otherwise, especially if you know how to use one, especially if you're good with cinematics. So that's all the gear that I have right now. Am I going to get an upgrade? I don't know. It depends. I am not making any money from YouTube or Facebook or anywhere else, and I don't have any sponsors. I don't know if I want to spend a lot of money when this thing and my drones are doing a great job. Does this thing have limitations? Absolutely. The biggest limitations I'd say is that it's a crop sensor, like a full-frame camera will allow that bigger image to be very helpful when I'm vlogging. I don't have to hold it out all the way over here. The other thing is that like this doesn't shoot in 4K. Even though I never edit in 4K, having that extra bit of image in 4K really helps because that means I can zoom in or crop into the image for the part to make it look more cinematic. And that's what I always end up doing with my Mavic Air 2. I always shoot in 4K, but at the end of the day, a certain crop of the original image usually looks better than the full image. It's not a mirrorless camera. It's a traditional DSLR camera, which makes things very, very heavy. When you're traveling with a carry-on like I do, or when you're like hiking a very dangerous mountain and you have a camera and a drone like hanging off your back, having that extra one pound on your back can really make the difference. And you being able to do a move that would be just too dangerous if you had a heavier camera on you. Let's say if I had to buy this camera all over again, I wouldn't buy this. I would buy the 90D because it does shoot 4K. It can shoot 120 frames per second at 1080, which is amazing. That's hyper slow. That's, again, adding another dimension to your cinematography. But that's not a full-frame camera either, which is the biggest reason I'd want to upgrade to a Kim camera. So that's why I'm not upgrading to a 90D right now. A step up, I'd probably get something like the EOS R. That's more around, I think, the $1,800 range. That's a full-frame mirrorless Canon camera, but it does have limitations. It does crop the image when you film with 4K and other things. If I were making a lot of money on YouTube, I'd probably get the EOS R6. That's around, I think, $2,500 US, plus taxes, whatever that is. If I was a millionaire, I would probably get the EOS R5, which is, I think, $4,500 or $4,100 right now. That can shoot 8K. I don't even know what I'd do with it, but if I had a million dollars, it wouldn't hurt to be able to shoot in 8K. The lens I'd probably use for that would be the Canon 24-70mm f2.8. That's a really solid lens if you're getting a full-frame Canon camera. I haven't talked about Sonys much. Sonys also have good cameras. So do other brands for sure, but I know Sony for sure has the a7C and the a7 III series cameras, which are kind of good as well. I'm just not very used to those cameras, so I haven't really planned on using them much or the lenses, but I know friends who use them and they're just as reliable as Canon and maybe even better, some would say. But you know, at the end of the day, when you're buying gear, there's several things you need to keep in mind, especially when you're traveling. Having a camera is not the same thing as traveling with that expensive camera. Right now, I'm traveling with I think $6,000 of filming and editing gear and I'm not going to fancy resorts in Italy and Bali. I'm traveling to places in Central America that are very, very shady and where I'm at constant risk of being mugged. So I'm paying about $40 right now a month just to ensure my camera body, my phone, and my laptop. I don't even have the lenses insured and I'm like constantly worried about what's going to happen if I get mugged. If I was just staying in Hawaii and filming there the whole time, I would have probably upgraded to better lenses because you know, that's kind of safe. No one's going to mug you there, but that's not the case. So that's one of the things that's stopping me from getting really, really expensive cameras because I don't just want to have the headache of dealing with it if something happens to my camera and I don't want that to be on the back of my head whenever I'm traveling and just, you know, that's just stress. I don't need to deal with right now. There you go. You have a review of my camera and all my gear and I hope you enjoyed it. If you like this video, hit that like button. If you want to see more videos by me, subscribe to my channel. I mainly do travel videos, but I will be doing a series on gear and now on editing because I've been getting a lot of requests for that. I'll catch you guys on the next video.