IFH 098: How to Build a Pimp’d Out BlackMagic Cinema Camera Rig on the CHEAP!

Welcome to the Indie Film Hustle Podcast Episode Number 98.

“I think cinema, movies and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made films were magicians.”
– Francis Ford Coppola.

Broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood, it’s the Indie Film Hustle Podcast where we showed you how to survive and thrive as an Indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film business and here’s your host Alex Ferrari.

Welcome my Indie film hustlers to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, I am your humble host Alex Ferrari. Now today show is sponsored by VideoBlocks. Now VideoBlocks is a subscription based stock media company that gives you unlimited access to premium stock footage everyone could afford. If you’re looking for like extra exterior shots or things that you might want to incorporate into any of your projects whether be a narrative documentary, music videos, commercials. These guys got you covered. They got unlimited daily downloads from a library of over one hundred fifteen thousand HD video clips as well as a huge selection of after effects templates for like opening credits, motion graphics titles, company logos as well as motion backgrounds as well.

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That’s videoblocks V I D E O blocks.com forward slash hustle for this exclusive offer and don’t forget to go to freefilmbook.com that’s freefilmbook.com to download your free filmmaking audio books from audible. Now guys today show is a reaction to basically so many e-mails and messages, tweets about my BlackMagic Cinema Camera rig that I used for this is made when I was shooting it I posted a few pictures of my rig and he wearing it like a crazy person. And people want crazy and really want to know why.

First of all I should I decide to shoot with a BlackMagic Cinema Camera as opposed to a RED or ALEXA or something like that and then also how I was able to build the BlackMagic Cinema Camera that I use like so what lenses did I use, what kind of camera rig that I use, what kind of preview monitor all these kind of questions so I decide to put together a podcast and a very detailed show notes or article which will be obviously out in the www.indiefilmhustle.com/098 . So everything I talk about in this episode will be in that URL and I put direct links on where I bought everything price points and things like that.

So let’s just go back and take it back before we get into it. Let’s take it back a little bit to so many months ago when I decided to make this. I decided to make this movie in April we are now in September. So in April I decided like I am going to make a movie and I had all I owned a BlackMagic cinema camera 2.5K which I used for some you know Internet stuff and some minor little things. So that’s why I never got a 4K BlackMagic Cinema Camera at the time because it was a little bit just it makes sense for like YouTube and stuff like that at the moment. So I had this BlackMagic Cinema Camera. Let me let me start testing it.

So I started testing it I have a set of Rokinon lenses which I’m going to actually go into a whole other podcast about the lenses and about where to get them and all that stuff in another podcast but I had some broken eye lenses. I had a Sigma 18-30 zoom lens and I start playing with it and since I’m a colorist I started throwing it up on the DaVinci Resolve and seeing what I could do. So I start pushing the BlackMagic Cinema Camera and seeing what I could do with it and I was really shocked that how beautiful the images came out.

You know and you know I’ve I’ve worked with ALEXA, I’ve worked with RED’s, I’ve worked with Phantom’s, I’ve worked with a ton of different high end BlackMagic Cinema Cameras but this little camera was really impressive. And for what it was you know like for the by far it’s the best bang for your buck on the market. There’s no question. I’ll argue anybody that for the money this is the best image you can get for the money and have the ability to have a RAW file in color grading. It’s amazing. It really really is remarkable and I’ll talk a little bit about the post workflow about the BlackMagic Cinema Camera and a little bit towards the end of the episode. So anyway I decided to put together.

I said you know what I’m going to shoot with this BlackMagic Cinema Camera so I’ve got a eyelens package that I’ve had and a couple tips I want to give you guys on when you’re shooting with a BlackMagic Cinema Camera. Well and by the way. First of all people ask me why did’nt you shoot with the 4K version, why did you 2.5. Simple answer was I own the 2.5.

I didn’t want to spend extra money on getting a 4K and then also the amount of hard drive space and media that I would need to have purchased to have to get just to be able to work with all the workflow considering I was the D I T, I was the assistant editor, I was everything I needed to simplify the workflow for myself. So what I decide to do is just shoot it at 2.5. So let’s just put it this, put it into perspective. If you get a card, let’s say two hundred forty gig card and SSD Card is what they what the BlackMagic Cinema Camera shoots on. That gives you at RAW 2.5 gives you about forty five minutes.

Now if I would have shot 4K that forty five minutes would have turned into twenty some minutes and then I would have had to purchase more of them or purchased larger ones so like my forty eight. I have a four hundred eighty gig card as well. That gave me about an hour and a half of RAW. Which is pretty amazing. But they’re expensive and they’re like one hundred some dollars each. Now mind you not as expensive as a RED or in ALEXA situation but you know for a very low budget kind of movie I wanted to kind of make it as bare bones as possible and also I wanted to kind of create this experiment to see if I could create a full blown feature film that looks looks good at such a low budget with a.

You know a BlackMagic Cinema Camera that’s not known for making cinematic images. Don’t get me wrong. They are but like you know nothing compared to ALEXA or RED so I wanted to see what I could do with it. So I said screw it I want to do 2.5. It just made more sense for me workflow wise.

So right now just so you guys know I shot part six terabytes of footage for this little little movie shooting RED. I mean shooting a RAW and so if I would have shot 4K, it would have been twelve terabytes. Now twelve terabytes you know like oh I would just get a couple of you know eight terabyte drive and you’re good to go. Yeah but you know if you want redundancy if you want to have at least two copies of everything which is what I have plus I have a a ray drive. So if things crash. You have protection things

like that. It starts getting pretty pricy. So a six terabyte to ten terabyte situation becomes a lot a big big difference especially at this price point. So a couple of tips. The BlackMagic Cinema Camera loves light, lots and lots and lots of lights. So make sure you always give it plenty of light it holds the highlights very well and it also digs in to the darks very well I was surprised at how much how much it kept the latitude on this is you know on the paperwork it says thirteen stops. So you know I wouldn’t push it that far but if you’re put if you shoot it down the middle and you have probably. You know three or four stops real clean latitude.

It’s pretty remarkable. And you also want to shoot it out a four hundred ISO. I know they say it’s rated at eight hundred ASO. But both Austin my my second BlackMagic Cinema Camera and gaffer and myself both figured out that four hundred was the way to go and and we could tell the difference so we definitely shooting four hundred ISO. Now by the way anyone who’s listening to this and if I’m talking jibberish to you guys because you don’t understand everything I’m talking about that’s fine. I’m just going to go and go over a little bit of this. I’m not expecting you guys to know everything I’m talking about but I wanted at least put the information out there and there’s a little bit a lot more detailed information on the post at the end of your www.indiefilmhustle.com/098 .

So the other big thing is do not and I repeat do not shoot a feature film in ProRes for two two HQ. You will be tempted to shoot in progress because that four hundred eighty gig media card that I had would care. I think it’s like five hours of progress on that one card. So you’re like oh man I could just shoot all day on one card yet it’s all great and dandy. But the problem is that you have to shoot that movie perfectly. So your lighting has to be on point. You cannot mess up.

The beautiful thing about shooting RAW is that if you do make mistakes on on the set with lighting not enough lighting not enough time which I guarantee on a low budget movie you will make mistakes. It happens I made mistakes but because of the RAW file the RAW file allows you to fix those mistakes. If you would shoot ProRes if I want to shoot ProRes in this movie. There’s a lot of shots that I probably wouldn’t have been able to work with purely because of time, light, not having a full grip truck and many other things that I had did not have on the shoot but shooting RAW saved me so I would definitely suggest shooting RAW and that was one of the big big selling points of the BlackMagic Cinema Camera is you could shoot RAW even the pocket camera which I’ll talk to about another episode which I don’t own but I’ve heard. It’s great when you’re able to shoot RAW in any time you can shoot RAW.

That is what you want to deal with and then I’ll talk about the workflow. Honestly I’m going to do an entire podcast about the post workflow how I worked in DaVinci Resolve, how I’ve colored this in DaVinci Resolve. How I edited the entire movie in DaVinci Resolve. I’m going to do an entire workflow of you know talk podcasts about how I did that but this one’s about building this BlackMagic Cinema Camera rig.

So first things first. Obviously you want to get a BlackMagic Cinema Camera. You can get a four in this, no problem but understand that they’re just going to be those little workflows like on the next movie I do I’ll probably go for purely because I now have the infrastructure, have purchased the hard drives that I need things like that that I can handle a bigger workflow since I was doing this all from the beginning. I just had to kind of play it safe and didn’t want to get caught up.

Even my self-imposed even though I own a post situation. I didn’t want to get myself caught up and want to make things as simple and easy as I could buy while still maintaining the best image quality possible. So get yourself a BlackMagic Cinema Camera again links for all of these things are on that on the URL. The media that I used Kingston Digital. I got a four hundred eighty gig SSD card and I got a two hundred forty gig most of my cards were for two hundred forty gigers. I had like four or five of those and had one four hundred eighty gig which I used for the big long night and they run anywhere from eighty bucks for eighty one dollars right now on

Amazon for the two hundred forty to one hundred forty five and they kind of go on sale every once in a while but those are those are the prices I mean that’s really really cheap considering if you try to price out what RED media costs or what ALEXA media costs. It’s pretty remarkable and also just so you know. So you guys know I had access to full RED dragons and full ALEXA’s that would have been given to me for free to shoot this movie because I have friends and I have a lot of people that wanted to help me with this movie but I decided against it. Now I know everybody listening like Alex. Are you crazy.

You could have shot with a RED, you could shot with an ALEXA. It would’ve been so much better and like yes the image might have been better. Arguably it definitely would be better but for the kind of movie that I was trying to make which was a low budget Indie Dramedy. It was overkill and I’m going to give you some examples of why I decided to go with a smaller camera that still gave me amazing image quality. One I could own the camera. I can play with it. I can test it and I could do all experiment and do all sorts of different things where if I would have been given this BlackMagic Cinema Camera I would have had to have shot.

First of all our schedule was a six week schedule. Meaning that I only shot eight days within those six weeks because we were working around actors schedules. So because of that we needed to do many different shooting experiments things like that. Nobody was going to give me that BlackMagic Cinema Camera those cameras for six weeks just sitting around in my house so I can play with. That’s not going to happen. So that was one of the reasons I want to do it because I was the DP on this movie and I wanted to kind of play with it, test it. See really what I could do kind of beat the BlackMagic Cinema Camera up and I would have been able to do that if I didn’t have this camera.

Another big point, no production insurance. I didn’t need any rental production insurance. So any time you go to these big houses they’re going to give you a hundred thousand dollars package. Guess what guys you need insurance and I did not have the money nor did I want to go out and get production insurance. Again I was trying to make this as simple of a process as possible and that was a big selling point. Another thing is it’s a small footprint. Even that big rig that you guys saw is a smaller footprint that then a RED package or ALEXA package on those Gorilla filmmaking moments that you’re out on the streets. Possibly stealing shots.

Possibly going into places that you are not allowed to shoot to get shots having a big rig is going to be a problem that’s why the DSLR have been some popular because a lot of people go out and no one even knows you’re shooting a movie. So this BlackMagic Cinema Camera. You know when I had to go into more heavily populated areas where I didn’t have particularly permission to shoot. You having a smaller rig helped dramatically could not have done that with an ALEXA. The other big selling point is amazing post-production workflow that I was able to just bring it into DaVinci Resolve which is owned by BlackMagic Cinema Camera. So the workflow is super seamless.

I can edit RAW, I can color great and finish my movie right in there and also the affordability of the pimping out of the rig as I like to say. And customizing it’s to fit my shooting needs was so much more affordable. Even if I would have gotten a RED Camera RAW by itself to try to get a rig you would have to rent a full blown rig. But if you want to try to purchase those kind of ancillary products to kind of help or actually make the damn thing work you need all these kind of things to make it work. It’s super expensive. So shooting with BlackMagic Cinema Camera I was able to create an entire rig professional wonderful rig that worked for probably a.

I think I don’t know what the final total was but it’s under twenty five hundred bucks not including the BlackMagic Cinema Camera but just a rig was under twenty five hundred bucks and probably less than that with oh probably about two grand if you include the media and things like that than it probably around twenty five hundred but that’s insane in the camera world. That’s insane. And I want to go over all of those little nifty tricks and vendors that I found that helped me get to this high quality rig at a very low cost.

So we’ve gone over the media. The next thing is the camera cage. The camera cage is something that actually wraps your camera and protect your camera from other things from you know dings and bungs, bangs and stuff but it also allows you to give it a little more weight. And it gives you ability to start building your camera rig. You can start attaching things to the rig itself because it has the holes that you can kind of screw things in on and kind of build this kind of Frankenstein monster of a camera rig which completely is unique to you. So one camera when you see camera guys and camera rigs out in the world.

Those are built by the camera guys themselves. They are very they’re not stock. They’re all very specific to the needs of that camera person that cinematographer that production because that’s the way it works. So that’s what I wanted that freedom at a price at a definitely a price point. So I use Camtree Hunt Pro Cage which is for the BlackMagic Cinema Camera. Camtree by the way you’re going to hear their name a lot. Now I did not get paid. Full disclosure, did not get paid a dime.

I’ve never even been in contact with these people. They’ve never contacted me. I love Camtree products. They are the most I get I use this term a lot best bang for your buck on the market period and they have dollies, they have just everything a filmmaker would need at a very affordable price and built pretty solidly. Is it a solid or so. Let me just put this way, this rig is two hundred thirty seven dollars. A standard camera rig even on the cheap end is about eight and nine hundred dollars and then if you start going into the more professional world to higher end world you talk in three grand two grand sometimes up to even five grand for these kind of rigs. This rig was made of metal. It has rods. You are able to put two to two sets of rods and one at the bottom one at the top.

You’ve got two wooden handles, a remote switch which by the way saved my ass. I loved having my little remotes which basically just grab the handle and I hit the little red button I didn’t have to like fumble to hit the record button on the camera. It actually had a remote cable which was great. You’ve got a handle with a top where you could actually mount a mike if you wanted to get like some real you know quick ambient sounds and it’s just brilliant. And you can just slap it right onto your tripod. And you’re good to go. It’s so amazing. It really really is. So it works this rig works for both the 2.5 cinema camera and the 5K and the 4K’s well.

The next is the preview monitor. Now preview monitors as you know are obscenely expensive and there is I mean you could spend five seven grand on a preview monitor. I mean the RED preview monitor alone is like three grand I think something along those lines. It’s pretty nuts. So I use the free world. F W 759 seven inch ultra HD. Now again don’t have don’t worry about reading all this stuff guys, just go to the URL www.indiefilmhustle.com/098 and they have everything there. So I’m just kind of going over everything.

This little monitors one hundred forty nine bucks and it works perfectly. Is it in ninteen twenty by ten eighty image. No, it’s a twelve eighty by eight hundred resolution image but it’s vivid it’s clear and it’s nice. It works perfectly fine. I’m not color grading off this monitor I just needed something else to see comes with the hood, this little package comes with an arm comes with a HDMI cable comes with a little mount on it so you can just mount a directly onto your camera. It’s really crazy.

It’s awesome. It needs a battery which I talked about in a minute but it was awesome. It’s great for steady cams is great for low little rigs it works wonderfully it really really worked wonderfully for one hundred fifty bucks. You can splurge and go to two hundred fifty they have different versions but this is the one that I use. And I was able to mask out my two three five aspect ratio which is what I shot Megane which is in a two three five aspect ratio. It’s pretty good you’ll see you’ll see pictures of this rig you’ll see the pictures of the monitor throughout the post. It’s pretty cool.

Now the one big thing you need is though this monitor and that’s this is where the. This is where people get stupid. The BlackMagic Cinema Camera has a BNC cable out. It does not have an HDMI output. You need to get a BNC/SDI out to HDMI converter. Now usually these converters are extremely expensive especially if you use the BlackMagic Cinema Camera one specifically because aside I don’t know how much it is but it’s pretty expensive. I found one for twenty nine ninety nine. It’s wonderful. I attached to the back of the monitor, ran the cables and it works perfectly. Works perfectly thirty bucks.

It’s really really great wonderful. The other thing I also needed was obviously a BNC cable. BNC SDI it’s kind of the same thing but the cable itself eight ninety. These are all Amazon everything I got I got it on Amazon. Then I got a power power source for the converter that actually cost twenty bucks which is one of these portable chargers where you can quick charge your iPhone and quick charge like your iPad. I got a twenty bucks, you slap it on that thing will last all day. It’s wonderful and I also use that to run my audio set up my TASCAM but will talk about that another day.

Great little trick. It’s just it’s just it works it works great. The other thing I bought was the portable protective travel case for the monitor. This is not a luxury guide you absolutely need to have this it’s twenty bucks. It’s bucks. It protects it you can put your batteries in there, you can put all your everything regarding the monitor you can put in there. It’s great for twenty bucks.

The next thing is the batteries. Now you do need batteries and especially these kind of standard Sony batteries which are they Li-Ion DC batteries. They’re like twenty bucks for the small. Twenty one ninety eight for the small ones and then the bigger ones which last a little longer. The little fatter. They’re forty three bucks and they come in a package of two with with a charger and a car charger as well. If you get caught out there in the world but it’s really great you slap it on the back and that I think I changed it with that once I have a big one on I think maybe on the longest day we had to swap it out but you know it generally last all day.

It was just great. So there you go. Now the next thing I build out was a follow focus you definitely need a Follow Focus. Now Follow Focus can get stupidly expensive. And if you know what Follow Focus is guys, Follow Focus is basically what you attach to these rods that you build in your package. Again I have pictures and videos of all of this on the post but you attach it on and then you can connect it to the gears of your lenses and then based on that you can follow your focus and I pulled all my own focus on this movie.

So I’m actually quite shocked when you guys watch the movie, you’ll see certain things that are ranking focus and stuff like that. I did that on the fly and don’t think I’m an expert or anything like that. I just chose the best moments while I was editing it. So a benefit of being an editor you can hide all your mistakes but I chose the Fotga Upgraded DP500III Quick Release Dampen Follow Focus for BlackMagic Cinema Camera which means that you normally when you put on.

You know start building up rigs if you can do anything that’s a quick release. You know you can a snap it on and snap it off as opposed to just running it through the bars and then and then if you like let’s say you stack in to three things which you will. On the rods. Then and it let’s say you want to pull out the Follow Focus because it’s not working with lens that you have you like shoot so you have to pull everything out. But if you do a quick release all you do is just open it up and pops right out quick release.

I did a couple quick releases in this package but that was. It’s a hundred ninety nine bucks guys works great. Is it the best thing in the world. No. Are there better ones out there. Yes. Does it do the job. Absolutely. Never failed me once on my entire shoot. So that’s the thing I’m trying to tell you guys don’t always look for the shiny. Oh this is the best this is the best I need the best just find what works and it might work for one or two projects and then you move on to another piece where you can you know if you if you’re going to start building up a rig

that’s going to last you for the next ten or fifteen years then you’re going to talk about tens of thousands of dollars but if you buy smart and check your reviews and listen to things like I’m talking about someone who’s actually shot with everything I’m talking about, it’s going to be very helpful to you with any productions or films or anything that you do in regards to gear in the future.

Now the next thing is the matte box. The matte box is one of easily one of the most expensive parts of a rig. I’ve I mean and it took me a while to find this man. It really did but to find a solid. There’s a lot of cheap. There’s a lot of cheap matte boxes out there that are made of plastic and things like that. You want to find something that’s made of metal.

That’s a little bit sturdy and that can do what you needed to get done and there’s so many aftermarket boxes that are built up for DSLRs that could be used for the BlackMagic Cinema Camera and you just have to find the right one. What I chose was Camtree’s Swing away Wide Angle Carbon Fiber Matte box. This was this is a great little a great little matte box that comes in it’s own little like carrying case. You know plastic carrying case has all everything you would wanted to two stage. Matte box now as far stages a concern two stages means you can put one filter on or two in the end. Actually both rotate so you can put a polarizing filter in there for your outside shots. If you want to use a polarizer so having a two stage always get at least two stages because if you have one stage you know I always got a two stage but it was great. It worked wonderfully and I loved it. It worked like a it just worked like a charm for me and it’s two hundred forty five bucks.

I mean seriously two hundred forty five bucks. It’s remarkable. It really really worked really well for me and I loved it so that’s my matte box suggestion. Again it last me five or six movies I don’t know but it lasted me this movie and it’ll probably last me the next movie and it’s pretty robust for what it is you know I the closest thing I’ve ever found to it was like fifteen hundred dollars that was you know or eight hundred nine hundred dollars that was even remotely close to what this gave me and for the again best bang for your buck.

So the Camtree swing way on by the way the swing away aspect of things is really important because if onset you put it all on that you mount it all into the rods and it’s all set up. If you’ve got to change a lens. If you don’t have a swing away you’ve got to pull the whole matte box off. It slows you down but with a swing away you literally just hit a little lever and pop it swings out change the lens pop a right back in and you’re good to go. Well. Well worth it. All right guys. So the Camtree swing away carbon fiber matte box. Now this is by far the most important piece of equipment I purchased on my camera rig. I call it the back saver.

This is the camera the cam treat shoulder rig and it is plus support rod and this is so important because I was going to do this entire movie handheld and you know having this kind of rig on your body. It kills your back it’ll kill your back if I have you know the few times that I actually shot without the bar without the support rig. I was dying within five minutes I was like oh my God what this does is it basically gives you a weight belt that you strap onto your to your waist.

Above a pole like kind of moveable like a kind of like a little mini tripod that you mount on to the camera rig and you can kind of if you need to go up high. You can go up high. You go down low. You can go low. It’s pretty crazy and the stuff that I was able to get because of it, it was almost like a dolly move sometimes because I was able to just really pivot has this really strong rubber core that allows you to kind of pivot. Anywhere you want and it saved I mean I literally could sit there all day which I did with the damn thing on and it just did not bother me as much. Don’t get me wrong I was still in you know I was still sore and pay.

Shooting with it but without it I don’t think we would be able to shoot it. It just it was so wonderful and the price BEST BEST hundred twenty six bucks I’ve ever spent. Trust me if you’re going to do any handheld work at all you need to have this and it works with anything. It doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t have to be a Camtree rig or anything like that you can use any place you have some rods, plug right in and you can use it really really amazing rig guys definitely use that.

Now I keep talking about camera rods. Camera rods. Basically these big metal tubes that you can kind of slide into rigs to mount stuff onto so I use the eighteen inch rods because I wanted to have a big long handheld rig and again you’re building this rig for what your production needs so I knew I was going to shoot a handheld movie. This was never once on sticks in the entire movie was never on a pair a set a tripod or anything on a dolly it was always going to be handheld It was a style that I was going for this movie. So I had to build a rig that was appropriate for what my needs were for the film.

So having 18 inch rods which are huge by the way the twenty four bucks I use a small rig black aluminum alloy and you can get into carbon fiber, you can get into aluminum and all that you get into all the details. Do it guys. This work fine. You know you can get the more expensive ones if you want but these work perfectly fine and it allowed me to put on a pad in the back for my shoulder which I’ll get to in a minute and allowed me to stack on the matte box, the follow focus, the rig for the shoulder rig weight thing the support, the support rod as well as the arm for the the preview monitor which I’ll show you how I did that in a little bit as well. So it was it’s valuable. You definitely need to have them but again you don’t need to make it eighteen inches you can use five inch six and I think six inch eight inch twelve inch twelve fourteen I think they have a six and eighteen.

So it just depends. I chose the eighteen because it made sense for me and it worked really really great. The next thing I chose that I needed for my rig was camera handles. Now I know you’re going to say well you already had handles that came. These were beautiful wooden and handles that came with the rig the camera cage but I decided I wanted to get a little bit. I want to get lower. So I can go up because holding it up high. The body weight wasn’t proper for me so I want to have something a little bit lower base so a kind of balance and everything out a little bit better so I got the Camtree Hunt Quick Mount Fifteen Millimeter Camera Handle set. It’s one hundred ten bucks. It’s great.

And again you’ll see pictures of it in the post. It’s a quick release again so you can just slap it on, slap it off and it was great and you can adjust it to whatever you want. So I had one a little farther than the other one. And I was able to handle it. The way I set the rig up as I had one of the wooden handles the other one handle on my right. I kept out one because that was the one the had the remote button, the other one I took off never used it and then I had the two handles at the bottom. So I basically held the top wooden handle and then held the bottom left handle. So left handle bottom right handle wooden top and I know it’s all sounding crazy in a podcast. Just go and look at the video look at the videos and look at the the pictures and they’ll be a lot more clear this way.

But anyway. Those two things really worked well for me and I was able to maneuver and move the camera really really well. One hundred ten bucks. It works it’s solid It worked really really well. Now another really expensive part of camera rigs are the batteries to run it. Now everybody knows that at least everyone should know that the battery that comes internal with the BlackMagic Cinema Camera isn’t that great. It will last you maybe an hour, hour and a half maybe a running time. So it’s just kind of sitting there and you can pull it out or exchange it. That’s just the way the camera’s built is one of the things that they decided to do. So they said look you’re just going to have to get an external battery source now looking into battery sources you’re going to get the V mount batteries which are industry standard and they you

know the mounts themselves are expensive. You’re talking about three hundred four hundred bucks for the mount. This is just something to plug into the camera so then you could purchase a battery the mounted up. Now it is robust. It is great having these V mounts. They’re wonderful but they’re expensive and if you’re doing something on a really low budget. Like I was and again I want to see how low budget I can get and still have it work as an experiment and I found this amazing little company called Juice Box. Juice Box batteries and these guys are amazing. For one hundred bucks by the way those batteries as V mount batteries one to three hundred dollars sometimes more per.

These little Juice Boxes because my camera was small and not a RED or an ALEXA, it worked beautifully and I’ll show you and I’ll talk to you about how I was able to mount them. It actually comes with a mount on it such as a little screw you can actually screw it into the side of the camera rig. And you’re good to go and it works perfectly. But I wanted to be a little bit more clever, little bit more cool and I want to have my own mounting system like a kind of like a V mount. But on the cheap. So by the way these batteries run one hundred nine bucks. And they’re built for the BlackMagic pocket cameras as well as production cameras.

They will last my camera around three to four hours each. So I probably most of the time never even on the my biggest day I never ran more than two batteries. So they basically just cover you for the most of the day and when the camera is not being worked on or we’re breaking or something. I turn the camera off. Don’t let the camera just keep running and running and running. So it’s great and the wonderful thing about it is it actually juices up the battery inside the camera. So when you run out of batteries. So my battery dies. The battery inside the camera picks up so you never get a loss or a drop or like oh my God which you would have on a RED or an ALEXA. Because they don’t have internal batteries. This has an internal battery.

So if you’re on a run and you stuff like that you still got let’s say the you run out of battery you still have about an hour, hour and change of the internal battery left to keep shooting and I pushed it a lot of times so I could just keep shooting. So it’s a wonderful system. I really loved it. I got three batteries, those three batteries last 3-4 hours on the  shoot but I just figured I’m like I’m never going to shoot more than twelve hours. And I never have a camera running more than twelve hours in a row in one day and by the way once you pull one off you could start charging and it takes about a couple to three hours to charge it up. So it’s fine.

It works great. I loved it. Juice Box, $109 bucks for the price of one battery you have three. And that cover, So basically a further three hundred bucks basically which will cost a normal V mount matter. You can get three of these guys and they’re a little bit lighter and they just work really really nicely.

Now what I like to call is the Gorilla Battery Mount. How I was able to mount it to my camera and have kind of like a quick. You know kind of like a quick release mount. What I decide to do is I bought a quick release clamp adapter, fork is basically like a camera plate a tripod plate but it is really small and you can screw it right into the back of I screwed it right into the back of my shoulder pad which I want talk about a second and then I screwed the other end into the back of the the bed, the Juice Box which by the way comes with screw holes built into the battery.

They know what they’re doing. So you can just you can just attach it to anything and then you just easily just go pop, pop, pop in, pop up and used. It was great it was just wonderful. I have a video showing the entire process in the post and again guys. I keep referring back to the post this is one of those podcast that is basically helping or give you a little bit deeper dive into the post because you need to visually see a lot of this stuff. To be able to understand it. So this is just kind of like an ancillary piece to kind of help support piece for the Post but I want and I’m going into a lot more detail in the podcast and I did in the post because I’m talking, not supposed to

writing. So the in that by the way that cost us seven dollars and forty cents. So I bought five of them. I had a couple extra just in case anything went down and you were good to go. The next thing I bought was the shoulder rig. It’s a Camtree Hunt Flexible Shoulder Rig Mount which I originally was going to use as a shoulder mount. But like a full blown shoulder my before I found the the shoulder rig with the support rod. So what I did is you could just I just unscrewed the actual shoulder pad which was great.

By the way the price is one hundred twenty five bucks. You can pull out the pad which is great has all sort of mounting capability and that’s where amount of the battery and then the arm aspect of it. I used to mount my monitor. It was great. See I just put it into the rods and then it was a very flexible arm so I could kind of move it wherever I wanted and it just I just screwed it in and were out the door. It was great. The Camtree Flexible Shoulder Mount one hundred twenty five bucks can’t go wrong. So guys that’s basically it. Now you’ll see an extra handle that I had an extra old wooden camera handle. It was like one hundred twenty five bucks.

That’s a rubber and stuff. I had it when I owned my RED camera and I just had a lying around. So I used it and it was really nice having two handles the kind of jump the can you pull the camera on and off but it’s not needed. Other than that everything that’s on that rig I’ve just talked to you about and that’s the breakdown of how it was able to build a pimped out camera rig and the final price for this entire rig. I’m going to tell you is twenty one hundred fifty bucks approximately for everything I told you in here including the batteries. So that’s including all the batteries and cleaning all the media. So you can drop the media depending on what your needs are. But that alone right there was like three four hundred bucks so for say twenty one hundred fifty dollars.

I pimped out an entire BlackMagic Cinema Camera rig and then the BlackMagic Cinema Camera itself is retails for about two thousand bucks but this is what I did when I bought it originally. I bought the I bought it with by the way it comes with an official copy of DaVinci Resolve. So that DaVinci Resolve retails for about six seven hundred bucks eight hundred bucks or I think it retails for like a thousand bucks for the for the retail versions as a dongle so what I decided to do was I took. Because I already own DaVinci Resolve but you if you already have you can get a free version of DaVinci Resolve and it will handle pretty much almost everything that you would need it done. So you really don’t need it. Unless you absolutely want it but what I did was I took that DaVinci Resolve copy and I sold it on Amazon.

Because that’s the way I hustle. I sold that for I think was six hundred fifty bucks. So for that six hundred fifty bucks chop the price down of that camera to thirteen hundred fifty bucks that supposed to two thousand. So there you go I just saved you six hundred fifty bucks by doing that then there’s not a lot of competition for that by the way on Amazon. So or you could sell it on eBay as well but you’ll get at least five or six hundred bucks for DaVinci Resolve doggle and there you go. And if you don’t need it.

Unless you absolutely do the research of what your needs are for DaVinci Resolve if you’re going to use DaVinci Resolve as a finishing or editing program. Then do it but there you go. So honestly all in for under thirty five hundred bucks for under thirty five hundred bucks if you use my DaVinci Resolve technique to sell. You’ve got an entire camera rig package. No lenses yet lenses are another story but entire camera package. You’ve got for under thirty five hundred dollars that’s going to shoot you cinema quality images that and you’re shooting RAW. It’s pretty remarkable guys I mean the world that we live in is pretty amazing.

So again I went out to make this is Meg not only to prove that I can make a good movie that I enjoy, enjoy watching. But that I can do it on the cheap and do it myself. That’s one of the reasons why I mean I have a ton of cinematographer friends who wanted to DP for me for free and I said no I’m going to do it because I want to prove that it can be done it was an experiment and that’s what Meg is a lot of Meg

was an experiment to see what we can get done on the lowest budget that we could get everything done on and we did and I can’t wait for you guys to see the quality of the images, the quality of the story. Which I really love and the performances of the actors and Jill and everybody but on a technical standpoint I wanted to see what could be done. I wanted to do something that really. It’s not done as much anymore or at all. You know how many movies have you heard that’s been shot on the BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve 2.5. Edited on DaVinci Resolve and colored in DaVinci Resolve and finished in DaVinci Resolve. It’s not something you see every day so I wanted to prove that to be done with the tools that you guys all have access to. So that is that was my one of my goals in making this Meg.

I want to prove to you guys that it can be done and hopefully I’ve shined a little bit of light a little beacon that says Holy crap Alex can go do this. I can go do this too. I can read I can scrounge up to three grand and get myself this camera package and by the way you can also probably get the 4K version. You know there’s a lot of use versions and you know use things out there on e-bay and on Amazon and things like that. Or you can buy a little bit cheaper not everything I bought by the way all these rig stuff was all brand new. So you could try to buy it used if you want to go even cheaper but I wanted stuff to you at least you know because it was so cheap. Anyway I was like sure I may just get the new stuff. But I hope this inspires you guys to say shoot me and I can go shoot this.

I can go make a movie and that’s what I really hope this is Meg does for all of you guys for the tribe and for anyone who hears a story that it can be done that we can go do it and there’s no excuses anymore because I know a lot of you guys out there like I don’t have the money to go rent the RED or I don’t know what I’m doing I need to hire DP and I need to do all this and all that well you know what you do and that’s fine if you want to or you can go my route and educate yourself enough. You know because if you buy this camera take six months and go shoot a bunch of shorts. Take six months and just start playing if you’re starting from scratch and start playing and seeing what you can do with the camera push the camera push yourself. You know shoot test come back.

That is a wonderful thing about owning your own rig where you can go off and play and do experiments and see what works and what doesn’t work so when you go into battle when you go onto a feature film you’re ready to go. You’re ready to rock and roll. You know I did a lot of testing before but I learned a lot every day I shot on Meg I learned something new about the lighting, about the camera, about the lenses, about what I can do and not to even mention let’s talk about the story and working with the actors and things like that you always learn every time you shoot but on a technical standpoint since I was holding so many hats are wearing so many hats on this project. I learned so so much from doing it. So guys there’s no frickin excuse man. There’s just no excuse. All right. I don’t hear anybody.

I just I just talked to a guy who made a movie with a BlackMagic pocket camera. The pocket camera for God sakes. Not even the cinema camera the pocket camera which brand new is a thousand bucks huge you could probably get it for five or six hundred and there’s rigs for all of that too that Camtree make as well that you can go shoot an entire movie with the pocket camera and that’s crazy to me like I’m like shoot man that’s even nuttier. But you know what, he got a movie made and he rock N roll with it and goes off and looks great. It looks great even with a pocket camera you can shoot RAW and that’s the key guys shoot RAW shoot RAW shoot RAW. But I hope again I hope this inspires you to not sit on your ass and you can go out and make something and don’t wait for like the best and the brightest and I need this I need that and one other thing guys. A lot of people that don’t want you to succeed or are jealous or are just little trolls let’s call them that don’t want you to succeed or jealous or any of this stuff are going to tell you. Oh God you are shooting with the BlackMagic Cinema Camera, what a piece of crap camera that is. I actually had someone say that to me on this project and I heard it from a second source and I said to myself you know what man. You keep talking all your crap but you know what I’ve got a movie made.

What have you done. There you go. That’s the best kind of revenge. Just go you know what it’s fine. You can say whatever you want but I’ve got a future made and I’m going to have two more next year. Am going to just keep going and I am not going to let anybody tell me. Oh it’s not the best or what a crap camera or doesn’t have this or there’s a crop ratio with your lenses and all this stuff. Look guys. It is what it is and you do what you can. Now one big huge tip guys I’m sorry I’m going off in tangent one HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE TIP and when to put this on the on the post is if I was going to buy a brand new camera today. This is what I would do because I bought a camera that had an E.F. mount and E. F. mount is basically a Canon lens mount. So you can only use Canon lenses on it.

So what I would do is I would buy a Micro Four Thirds mount and you’re going Alex but I don’t want to use Micro Four Thirds lenses. I’m not suggesting you do what you do do as you buy something called the Metabones Adapter. The Metabones adapter. This is this magical piece of gear. It’s about six seven hundred bucks. It is quite pricey in our world but for what it does it is amazing and I would have bought it. If I could have done it but they don’t have a Canon to Canon mount. So when I buy my next BlackMagic Cinema Camera I’ll buy a Micro Four Thirds and then just have this adapter live on it. What this adapter does it gives you another stop of light. So if you have one eight lens you end up shooting at a point eight. This is like Stanley Kubrick style lenses lens like light sensitivity like what he shot with Barry Lyndon. I think Barry Lyndon was at a point eight or point seven to shoot that sensitivity.

That’s what it does it allow. It basically takes all of the light available coming into the lens and just focuses it all. Also there’s a still thing called the crop factor because we are shooting with the BlackMagic Cinema Camera. It’s not a full, full sensor asserts Super thirty five millimeter full sensor size. So in other words when you put an eighteen millimeter on the lens. You’re not getting really an eighteen you’re getting more like a twenty four millimeters. So you get a crop factor so you’re not getting everything that the lens can give you. This Metabones helps with that it helps eliminate much of the crop factors you get bigger images you get more of what the lens has to offer. It is magical man. I can’t wait to start using it. I saw testing with it. It’s great. The Metabones adapter I want to put at the very end as a bonus on the on the post and if I haven’t said it enough the post for this. The show notes for this is indiefilmhustle.com/098 .

So guys I hope this shines light on my camera rig. I hope you get some inspiration out of it that you guys can go out and do this yourself. I mean seriously go out and do this yourself. Don’t let anything stop you guys. There’s no excuses, is not ninety ninety seven anymore. It doesn’t cost millions of dollars to go make a movie. You can go make your movie tell your story and as I always say you have a responsibility to get your art out into the world could you have no idea how your art will affect another human being. So now we’re done with the inspirational talk. I’m off my soapbox now.

Episode one hundred coming up guys. And I have some things cooking. I think you guys are going to be really excited to hear what is going to be on that episode. I have think I have a little surprise for you. I’m not sure yet but it’s episode one hundred. It’s a monumental episode for me because I can’t believe that I’ve done one hundred episodes in a little bit over a year because I’m crazy. And I have, I have a life but I don’t know how I am able to do everything I do but I do it.

Anyway so. Keep an eye out the next next week. You’ll come out so keep an eye out and definitely listen to that episode is going to be a lot a lot of fun. So guys as always keep that Hustle going, keep that gym alive and I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle Podcast at indiefilmhustle.com.