Wonder what hardware we use to make one of our review videos? Surprisingly, making review videos isn’t as complicated as you would think though it does take a bit of time and the learning curve might be a little steep.
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For SD cards, we’ve settled on SanDisks as out of the three brands that we bought cards from (SanDisk, Panasonic and Kingston), the SanDisk’s are the only ones that we can still use after three years.
All other shots are done on whatever smartphone is available in either an iOgrapher or Beastgrip Pro.
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What are the prices on SanDisk SDHC cards on Amazon?
The lighting setup for our product closeup shots is a little different as it is very DIY-ish. It’s a great combination of PVC pipe, work lamps and CFL’s. The setup is quite limited and isn’t mobile at all but works well enough that we’re not bothered by it. We are looking at improving the setup shortly with LED lights.
Are there Fotodiox 312 LED lights on Amazon?
At one point, we were able to get away with a wired lapel mic but with the wireless mics offer much more freedom regarding movement when it came to the torture test videos.
Over the last few months (May 2016+), some of you have noticed an improvement in our audio, and we haven’t done anything different, but we’ve had help from http://www.manuelkarakas.de who has been an absolute pleasure to work with.
Get a set of Sennheiser EW 100’s on Amazon!
The lighting setup for our product closeup shots is a little different as it is very DIY-ish. It’s a great combination of PVC pipe, work lamps and CFL’s. The setup is quite limited and isn’t mobile at all but works well enough that we’re not bothered by it. We are looking at improving the setup shortly with LED lights.
See how many variations of the Vanguard Alta 263 on Amazon.
For the drop tests, we primarily use the GorillaPod Hybrids and GorillaPod SLR’s (the SLR is the bigger one). As much as we love the GorillaPod’s, the legs on the tripods tend to crack if you try to compress them too tightly.
For the action shots, we tend to use the GorillaPod Action Clamps with Locking Arms and GorillaPod Arm. Out of all the Joby products, we love these mounts the most because of the flexibility they offer us. We will note that with the action shots, we shoot with iPhones because of all the great cases that we can mount to the Action Clamps (like the HitCase Pro).
Lastly, we mount our devices to the GorillaPod tripods using Joby’s GripTight mounts. The GripTight mounts are sufficient in keeping our iPhones and Galaxy S’s secure during the shots.
Check out all the Joby GorillaPod products on Amazon!
The folks over at HitCase suggested we check out the POV glasses from Pivothead. The Pivotheads that they sent us work well for general action footage but it was difficult to integrate macro and wide shots as you needed to switch between the modes. The auto-focus was finicky as well.
We’re currently using a product called the Geco cam (Mark II to be exact). For viewers with keener eyes, you may have noticed the Geco cam on Aaron’s glasses during some of the torture test videos. The FOV is quite wide which works great, and the auto-focus is quick which means we can easily shoot a wide drop-test video and quickly pull in the iPhone case to show the damage. The colour on the Geco cam is a little off but we’ve been able to fix that during post-processing.
The Macbook Pro Retina has been rock solid, but it is getting a little sluggish. This is the first generation Retina, and we did opt to get the 16 GB RAM upgrade, but it is reaching that point in its life where it starts doing odd things. The laptop still does its job but shooting 4k video is out of the question as it’s almost impossible to render any of the footage in real-time.
For storage, we have two setups. Short-term storage is done by a rugged LaCIE 256 GB SSD. This drive travels with us between the home we film in and the office we work out of. For all the video back-ups (up to 1-year ago), we use a Western Digital MyBook.
Find out how much a LaCIE 256 GB Rugged SSD is on Amazon! or get the Western Digital MyBook!
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