Filmmaking is too easy w/ Smallrig's New Gear

As a filmmaker, here's some things that I really hate. When stuff costs way too much, when you're swapping batteries all day, when you have cords and cables going everywhere, when you need a specific tool to set up part of your rig, you can't just use your hands, all these things drive me nuts and they slow down the process. So everything you're going to see in this video is not only designed to make filmmaking as easy and fast as possible, but it's on sale right now up to 30% off for SmallRig's Black Friday sale. This video is sponsored by SmallRig, but I love their gear. I've been using it for years and I'm going to show you some awesome tricks you can use with this stuff, starting with this guy. For beginner filmmakers, lighting is so often the key difference between amateur and professional production value, or just a pleasing image. And this might be the best beginner light out there. It's a 60 watt RGB LED COB light. Did I just do the entire alphabet? This thing's pretty powerful. Not only is it small, lightweight, you can just mount it up anywhere, any little corner, get a little kicker, a little rim light going, but it's also got a built-in battery. Now this can be a negative too, but for beginners, it's amazing. You don't have to start investing in V-mount batteries, which can get a little expensive. You can just start lighting your films immediately. But the great thing about this is this light will grow with you as you grow as a filmmaker, because yes, it has a built-in battery, it's going to die and then, you know, you're just left with a cube, right? But the light comes in this little travel kit, and one of the things you get is this battery holder for the light. All you got to do is just throw it on. It stretches far enough to hold a V-mount battery, like that. Just power it by a USB-C, and you've got as much light as you need. You could also just use a USB-C power bank, it would work fine. So this is 100%, and you can see the power. It's nuts for such a small device with a built-in battery. It's crazy. Now you can change the color temperature, or you can hit this mode button here and switch to different modes, including effects and, of course, RGB. You can also use the SmallRig app to wirelessly control the light, which is very handy. So if I set this up back here, blast it, change the color temperature, let's go RGB with it. 1.25 mounting thread on the bottom with locator pin holes, love that. Now because this light's so small, it's using a mini Bowens mount, so you're not going to be able to use a standard Bowens accessory, like if you already have a softbox, but they do have mini Bowens accessories that you can use. In the case, you're also going to get a super short and a super long USB-C cable for however you want to power this thing, and two grips. A straight up hand grip with another 1.25 mounting thread at the bottom, and this for your light stands, C-stands, what have you. And if you're just starting to build out a real lighting kit, or you need something small that you can mount in tiny corners but still have a lot of versatility with, then the RC60C I do think is the way to go. Next we have this little beast, the RF10C. This is a little flashlight, you can focus and project light and make sharp lines. It includes this little rubber collapsible snoot that helps you control the light, and 20 different gobos that are all different shapes, whatever you want. By the way, these are all customizable, if you want you can just put some black gaff tape on it and cut your own shape inside the shape, but you just slide one of these gobos into the snoot, and then look, you got windows on the wall. If you're shooting in rooms with white walls, there's no set dressing, this just gives you some visual interest. You can push the button to get different colors. Once again, built-in battery, you can charge it or power it by a USB-C. 1.25 mounting holes all over it, so you can just set this thing up anywhere you want. This light pairs really well with a clamp attached to a magic arm, like this 22-inch magic arm from SmallRig. Makes it really easy to do a setup like this, where I can just open this cabinet for example, slide this thing on, screw it on, and there we go. Get it pointed at our back wall, you know, something like that. Why not? So yeah, that took about 30 seconds maybe to set up. Now this isn't the most powerful light in the world, it's only 10 watts, but if you know what you're doing and you get creative, you can achieve a lot of effects with this light. And super cheap, especially for Black Friday, so don't miss out. I do think everybody should have one of these in their kit. Now this light's a little heavier than this one, but let's see if it can still be held up by this magic arm, because if so, that's going to make it really useful for a rim light or for all kinds of mounting options. Flip it on first. All right. Okay. Oh my lord, it's actually holding. Let's see if this works. There we go. Now we're separating me from the background a little bit. So that took, what, one minute to set up? I can control it right here. Doesn't get much easier than that, folks. But again, when you're rigging up lights with clamps, safety first. Have some kind of safety harness. I wouldn't leave this up indefinitely. We got these two lights on these tiny stands. Let's see if we can do a moody lighting setup real quick. Try a window frame. Get this going. Give myself like a hair light, maybe. What if I made it warmer? Ooh, yeah, we can make it seem like this is emulating this light. That might be fun, which means we got to just lower the power a ton. Not too bad. Let's try bouncing the light off the wall. I'm just going to turn the light around and face the wall. Then I can bounce a softer warm light on me, bring down the exposure a hair or two. Can I do that? This is pretty cool. This is stylized, but we've got the flashlight, the RF-10C, giving the background wall something going on, letting you know that there's a window over here, motivating my key light, which is hitting me from the far side of the camera, which always looks nice and cinematic. And then we've got the RC-60C on orange RGB mode, just bouncing off the wall to motivate this light hitting me, give me some color contrast in the frame. And then I'm just kind of positioned sharply off the side of the frame, as if this was one end of some, you know, heated dialogue scene. The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. Now a few months back, I was hyping this guy up. This is the Potato Jet Tribex tripod. You know it as the one that does this when you pull the trigger. Doesn't get much easier than that for doing a quick setup. Now in that video, I was comparing this to my Sackler Flowtech tripod, which costs two or three times as much as this, and this one came out on top overall. And this has been my daily driver since I got it, but it's still about $800. That's not chump change. Well guess what? There's a new Tribex tripod on the market. It's the Tribex SE. The SE has most of the same features of the regular Tribex, but guess what? It's only half the price, and even cheaper for Black Friday. Now the crazy thing is, even though the SE is nearly half the price of the original, it goes just about as high. It weighs just about the same. When it's fully collapsed, it's actually a few inches smaller than the original, which makes it better for traveling with. Maximum payload on the SE is a little bit less. You get 13.2 pounds on here, but that's still enough for any mirrorless setup, any FX6 setup. Unless you're using a full-ass cinema camera rig, this is gonna be fine. You just will not find a quicker tripod to set up and break down than this thing. It's crazy. You'll never want to go back to a normal tripod once you get used to doing that. If you're on uneven terrain, you just pull the trigger, move it around till it's level, let it go, there you go. Now even though they had to remove a few features to get the price down, there's actually some things that are better about this than the original. This head still has a counterbalance, so you'll see it kind of bounces back to level when I let it go, but it's not adjustable. The other one had an adjustable counterbalance and adjustable drag so that the pans and tilts, you could control how much resistance there was. This doesn't have that, but in exchange, you're actually getting smoother pans and tilts on the SE version. I don't know what that is, they just have a different mechanism here I guess. And I find it much easier to get a very smooth pan and tilt on this versus the original tripod head. They also made some slight changes to the mounting plate. It's still a top loading, but it just works a little bit better. It's in there, tighten it, there you go. There's just lots of small features I love, like this retractable handle so it can be compact or really long. You can also change the angle of it, change which side of the tripod it's on, or just take it off altogether. It doesn't have quite as many hidden tools as the original one has, but they did still include a little allen wrench that magnetically locks in right there. You can get this thing hanging just off the ground if you take this center column out, spread the legs to their maximum width, and you basically have a hi-hat. You can get some really extreme low angles. If you're just starting out in your filmmaking journey, I do think a nice tripod is the first big investment you should make before you even get the camera, before you get the fancy lights. This will teach you to think like a more thoughtful filmmaker, compose your shots, not shoot from the hip all the time, and you want something that you can grow with that's going to keep your camera safe. That's why the counterbalance is important, so it won't just tip all the way over. And this thing checks so many boxes. The fact that it is half the price of the original makes it a no-brainer to me, especially since it's on sale right now. So I've mentioned V-mount batteries a couple times. They are on sale too. The VB99SC is their cheapest one, and it totally gets the job done. You're getting a mini V-mount battery. That small size that fits so well on camera rigs or your backpack. 99 watts means it's small enough to bring on an airplane on your carry-on. Any bigger than that and you're going to run into some TSA issues. But if you want a V-mount with all the bells and whistles, then this one is kind of nuts. This is the X99. Not only does it look super futuristic and have this crazy touch screen where you can see information about all the batteries that are in use, how much time you have left on the battery. It even has a flashlight built into the back there so you can see what you're mounting it on when you're working in the dark. All the ports you can imagine. Two USB-Cs, a USB-A, an 8-volt and a 12-volt DC port. You got your regular backplate power if you're just mounting it onto something. Then you also have two DTAP ports, one on either side. And you can use these ports simultaneously. I don't know, I've never maxed it out, but very versatile battery. You can even connect to this with the SmallRig app and control individual ports on it remotely. But to me the most useful features of this battery, which does cost a lot more than this one, is the two DTAP ports. This one only has one. And the fact that it is much more water, dust, and drop proof than the basic guy. Here we go, drop test on concrete with the X99. Three, two, one. Looks okay to me. Okay, drop test number two from about five feet high. Here we go. Everything's in good shape. Fresh off the drop test, let's see if it still powers on the Pyro 7. I've been shooting with this thing all day by the way, so not a lot of battery power left. Still works. Really could have used this on my last short film, The Lost Fortune of Oliver Brody. We were filming out in nature all the time. These things were getting put through the ringer. We even had a light that we were powering with the V-Mount battery that we were just holding over the river, so it would have been really easy to drop it. And having this one would have made me feel a lot better about that. Now this is my camera rig when it's in what I call studio mode. Okay, if I need battery power for a long time, if I'm not concerned about weight, then I'm setting it up like this. I've got the big six menu on the FX-30, thanks to their new firmware upgrade. Got the Pyro 5 monitor, which has camera control built into it. So I'm mainly just working with the monitor up here. And again, the two DTAP ports are coming in handy because they're powering the monitor and the camera and this is going to last me for hours. But best of all, I can click this button and it will tell me exactly how long it will last. Three hours and 40 minutes left and I'm at 87% battery. That's really useful information. It's small, it's compact, I can put it on the tripod and I'm going to be able to shoot for hours and not worry about swapping out batteries. So there's two small rig accessories that are making this really possible. This DTAP dummy battery that works for Sony NP-FZ100 cameras like the FX-3, the FX-30. Honestly, most of their cameras I think at this point use this battery. The other thing is this very minimalist V-mount camera rig plate. It uses thumb screws and levers so you don't need to use any tools to get your rig set up, which I love. So I attach my TRIBEX plate to the bottom like that and I just leave it on all the time. And then on the back, I mount the X99 battery and I just leave that on at all times. You can unscrew it to change the angle like that. I keep the Arca Swiss plate always attached to the camera. Pretty much everything I'm using uses this now except for the TRIBEX tripod. I slide that in and then just lock it like that. Flip out the screen, rotate up the battery, lock it. The other DTAP goes to the monitor. Tuck some of the cables between the battery and the camera. Tighten it up, flip it on, and there we go. This thing's ready for the tripod. So it's clean, it's compact, it's easy. Meanwhile, I just leave the X99 on the mount plate with the wires hanging out. And when I'm ready for studio mode again, I just slot it in, plug it in, I'm good to go. So if the tripod, the lights, the batteries will speed up your filmmaking, I've linked all this stuff below in the description. Check that out while the discounts are still live. Black Friday is the time to stock up and you will be supporting the channel at no extra cost to you if you use those links. So big thanks to SmallRig for sponsoring this video and making gear that helps filmmakers actually make more. Happy Thanksgiving everybody. Let's make some movies.