It’s been a time of change for many people over the last couple of years, since COVID. But for us, it’s been a time of accumulation and building, and we’ve been hard at work acquiring more equipment to do more of what we love!
After weighing up many camera options, we finally settled on Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k’s as our primary cameras for video work. The sensors produce gorgeous, crisp, cinematic images that we adore, and the cameras are as at home filming interview segments as they are being sped around a concert hall filming music videos.
We’ve paired these with Sigma Art lenses, which have a great reputation amongst the videographer community. They have a sharp, reliable image throughout their focal range and the 18-35mm is by far the most popular lens for the Blackmagic camera. We use the 50-100mm for our close-ups, and a 100-400mm for our “super close-ups” which let us film close-ups of a stage right from the very back of the audience.
There's always more to buy!
To compliment the setup, we have a whole host of support kit, including our gimbal, slider, and teleprompter. These are super-handy bits of gear which let us bring extra creativity to the shoots, and bring the production quality to a new level.
We’ve recently also expanded our equipment to a Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Extreme ISO, which allows us to monitor and record all of our cameras at once from one central location. We can use this for keeping an eye on cameras during concerts, of course, but we’re also fully equipped for live-streaming concerts, performances, zoom meetings, interviews etc to a global audience.
For our audio recordings, we’re primarily using mics made by Audio Technica. Their large diaphragm AT4040’s help us to capture an organic, transparent tone and we supplement those with AT2050s and Line Audio CM4s, all through our trusty Focusrite Clarett 8pre & Octopre.
For editing, we love to use Davinci Resolve Studio, and for audio, we’re using Logic Pro X while we’re using Mac’s for all of our editing.
We’re pretty happy with the overall setup right now as it gives us a lot of flexibility, but we’re sure there’ll be more in the shopping basket any day now.
