Today, I'm going to show you how to stick this on this
so that your Sony a7 III or pretty much any other
hybrid camera will let you shoot all day
without worrying about batteries.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music] ♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪ What's happening everybody?
I'm Gerald Undone. And I love you 3,000.
So today I'm gonna be showing you how to build that rig
that I've been teasing about on social media.
And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, that means
you don't follow me on Twitter or Instagram
and you definitely should be. But it's pretty easy.
All you have to do in order to get started is--
-[phone ringing] -Sorry. Oh crap.
I completely forgot about that.
Uh, yeah, I'm not gonna actually have time
to show you how to build the rig right now.
Sorry. Actually...
I might have an idea. Hold on a second.
Hey Josh. I got a favour to ask.
I'm doing a video right now on a rig for the a7 III.
But I don't actually have time to do it right now.
Do you think that if I sent you the parts you could
put it together for me? Could probably benefit
a little bit from your MacGyvering skills anyway.
Yeah? Perfect. Thank you so much.
I will send you the stuff right now.
[objects clattering distantly]
[funky electro music]
♪
-Wow. -[packing tape squeaking]
[box cutter scratching]
[cardboard clattering]
-[gears whirring] -What...?
-[gears whirring] -No!
This won't work at all.
Alright. I'm going to see what I can do to salvage this
because there's really no way I can see to use it as it is now.
I don't really know what Josh expected us to do with that.
Like are you supposed to get inside of it?
I don't know. Anyway, give me a minute.
[gears whirring]
[metal objects clanging and rattling]
[objects crashing]
Alright, so let's try this again.
So I've got all the parts here that we're gonna be needing
and I also have my item list here so that I can
give you the item codes for the two major suppliers
that we'll be using which is SmallRig for all
the rigging parts and Indipro Tools
for all the power parts. In the description
you'll find links to everything that I'm putting here.
Plus there'll be some alternatives as well
if you want to get specific tweaks to customize it better to
your setup or camera, but I'll get more into that in a moment.
So first up, let's put the camera in the cage,
but I'm just gonna tidy up our parts here
so that we know what we're working with.
[funky music]
♪
Okay. So this is the SmallRig 2103 Kit
and it comes with three different components.
You've got the cage, which is the 2087 Cage
and then you've got this double ball head unit,
which is the 1135. And then you have
the NATO rail attachment, the safety rail, which is 1409.
And then the handle on top is the NATO handle 1955.
With SmallRig it's easy, you can just type in
the code numbers and the product will show up.
That's the same for Indipro Tools as well.
That's why I'm telling you. Now this friction arm
does not come with this kit. I got this one separately,
and this is 2065 on SmallRig and I got that because this one
I think they've advertised to be using for the monitor, this
double ball head, but I thought that it was a little bit weak.
So I'm actually going to use it for secondary accessories
and I'm going to use the friction arm for the monitor.
So, you know your mileage may vary, but I think
that that's probably a better solution and it allows us
to free up for a little bit more customization as well.
So the installation of the cage is super easy.
There's just a screw on the bottom.
So we're just going to slide the camera in.
And then attach the screw
to the 1/4-20 socket on the bottom of your camera.
Now don't go crazy tight with it just yet.
One of the criticisms that I saw in the reviews
commonly was that they found that no matter how tight you put
the camera in that you could still turn it within
the cage and that is true.
But I found a solution to this that I don't think
many people realize. There's a little screw
that came with the kit-- Here, let me show you.
And I spent nearly ten minutes trying to figure out
exactly what this screw was for.
I'd pretty much given up on it.
There's also a little Allen key that comes with it.
And then I saw this tiny little hole in the side
of the cage here that lines up with the strap eyelet
and you can take that little screw
and with an Allen key if you put it in there, it stops
the camera from twisting in place. Now the handle
and the NATO rail, you can pretty much affix it anywhere.
There's just a loosener here that you can take the handle
off and then just two screws that you could obviously mount
anywhere you wanted. I went for a more conventional
top handle approach and I also like 'cause you can adjust
the handle a little bit with the screws on the side here.
You'll loosen those off and then you can slide
the handle forward and backwards. I like it
where there's a little bit of a front handle so I can get
my finger just a little bit, you know on the front there.
I think that that's a bit of a better grip,
but you can adjust it and set it where ever you want.
You can even use it as a side handle
if you want, by screwing it into the side of the cage.
Lastly on the side of the cage here
I have the HDMI cable holder from SmallRig code 1679
and this is good because the HDMI port is micro HDMI
on the Sony and it's notoriously weak.
So you just put the HDMI cable in here and then you can
tighten it down with the clamp like this. Works really well.
It's a little bit expensive for what it is.
I mean considering just a small little piece that gets
attached to two screws but in one way it's invaluable
if it stops your HDMI port from breaking. So we're going
to set the cage aside now and we're going to move
on to the rods part because we're going to need to use rods
in order to support the big battery that we want to attach.
And I've already assembled this a little bit.
So there's a few components here: this top piece
is the rod base plate from SmallRig and it is 1775.
Now, I did include an alternate version
in the description that is a little bit bigger
and it has a quick release plate because it might be
handy to be able to detach the whole cage quickly
from this base if you didn't want to run it
like that anymore. This one works perfectly fine
just requires you to screw it in versus having quick release.
The quick release version is a bit more expensive.
And then we've attached SmallRig rods here.
These are the 9"/15mm rods, which are code 1690
and they're carbon fibre and they're really nice.
Now, we're gonna want to deploy them more towards the back
because that's where we're going to put the battery here.
And this is the first piece from Indipro Tools.
This is just their plain Jane V-Mount battery plate.
It has a D-Tap connector on the side,
but nothing else. Some of the alternates
you can get of this actually have cables
coming out of them that go to Sony L NP-F battery
or a battery-- dummy battery specific to your camera.
So if you want to go that route you can
the advantage of this one is that it's a little bit
more versatile. You can use it on any system.
That's also one of the reasons why I like Indipro Tools
so much, is that it's pretty much whatever configuration
of power you could probably come up with. You're like,
"oh, I need a DC Port that connects this one so I can
alternate between my Blackmagic and sometimes with my red--"
Anyway, whatever you need, they've probably got it.
Alright. So now we're going to go ahead and screw
this whole rod system onto the bottom
of the a7 III cage and I've got two screws here.
I've the 1/4-20 and the 3/8 and we're going to use both
just to give it double security.
Now I mention the reason why I left this together
was because of the little tweaks that I did.
Well here you're going to see an example
if you still want to have access to the battery door,
which I recommend for something we talk about later.
You're going to want to maybe pop this open during this stage
and you see the clamps and where the rod positions are,
you want to make sure that nothing...
is interfering too badly with that and also you're going
to want to set this for later on for balancing on
a tripod, but we'll get into that section as well.
So right now the battery door can open and there's no issues.
So I'm going to tighten it down in this position.
Another pointer that I recommend is to have the connections
on the V-Mount plate facing downward.
That way you can just slide the batteries in from the bottom
like that and you don't have to worry about, you know,
getting-- your camera getting in the way and you can also adjust
the height and the angle of this thing, like you can tilt it
up or down or put it wherever you want.
But I found laying it down like this facing
backward gave it a bit more balance
for handheld and also when on the tripod when the battery
was attached because it gets pretty
front-heavy once you start attaching all your accessories.
So having the battery in the back like this will give it
a little bit better of a balance point.
The battery that I'm using is also from Indipro Tools
and it's part of their micro series which are
much more compact than regular V-Mount batteries,
plus they come with some other advantages like having
a USB port in addition to a D-Tap port on the side.
But they are a little bit more pricey
than their regular sized counterparts.
I'll include both in the description.
I do recommend the compact ones and the USB port
can be doubly handy when dealing with a camera
like the Sony that can be actively powered
over USB as well. And speaking of USB
you're going to have to decide when it comes
to a camera like the Sony if you want to use a dummy battery
or if you want to use USB and keep your battery
inside the Sony. When it comes to something like the GH5,
you have to use a dummy battery because you can't
power it over USB but several cameras these days do offer
active powering so you can definitely use it
in that case as long as two amps is enough
because that's all the USB port here, as well
as one of the USB port adapters that we're going
to talk about, it only provides two amps.
So if you have a Fuji camera that usually requires
power delivery, this might not work as well
and you're probably better off going with a dummy battery.
Now when it comes to dummy batteries, you have two options.
Like we were talking about earlier, you can get a plate
that has a dummy battery coming off of it for you that's already
wired in or you can get a dedicated one
like this one that comes from D-Tap.
Now, it's going to be more expensive in the long run
obviously, to collect all the different D-Tap
battery adapters, but you will have more flexibility
if you choose that route. But I definitely want to advise
you that you get what you pay for when it comes to this.
I've been using dummy batteries on the GH5 since I got it
basically to shoot all of my in studio YouTube videos
and I've gone through a couple different ones.
I've got one here for example that I got
on Amazon, was like less than $20 and you can see that
it's all electrical taped up and that's because the hole
didn't even line up with the GH5, and this is specifically
for the GH5, so I had to drill a new hole and rewire it and
tape it, and this one as well as another one that I've tried in
the past and one that I've had for my Canon previous to that,
they generate a little bit of a hum sound sometimes
when you record internally in the camera,
that's obviously not wanted. But with the Indipro Tools
ones, even though they are more expensive
they come with a few extra features.
Like this one's got a coiled cable
and they have regulators on them that not only
reduce that hum noise I was talking about
but they also regulate the juice flowing to the camera.
So it's not going to overheat and you're not gonna overpower
your camera and cause damage if you're doing a long time lapse
or something like that. But if you want to hear a little
bit of a comparison, here is an audio recording
boosted to the same level using the regular cheap Amazon
dummy battery that I've been using for a while.
[loud buzzing]
And now here it is again boosted to the same level
but with the Indipro Tools one.
[practically non-existent noise]
So, as you can hear it's much quieter and much better.
But anyway back to the Sony.
So, for this build, I actually decided to go
for this cable, also from Indipro Tools, which has a Sony
L NP-F style battery on this end so we can use it
to power an Atomos recorder.
And then on this end, the one that plugs into
the plate down here, has another D-Tap port
on this side and a USB port.
So we basically get the best of both worlds.
We get our USB port and our D-Tap port and it doesn't
matter whether we're using one of the new batteries with
a USB port or one of the old batteries without and it's going
to be easy to swap out batteries this way
because we don't have any cables actually
connected to the battery. At this point
you can configure the recorder however you like.
I've had two options that I think are okay.
I had one up here beside the handle
that way you can still hold the handle and then
I put the microphone on the right hand side.
Now, it was a little bit more front heavy, but it worked fine.
The other option is that you can actually turn it upside down
and mount it kind of, you know, sitting alongside
the battery somewhere like here, and this one's good
because you can still get-- get at the battery
and you can still access the camera from the side
but it makes the weight a little bit more centralized.
But one con, obviously, is that you can't
really see your LCD screen that well.
You can access things, but you can't see it unless
you kind of come in from the side here and peek at it.
Now if you were doing-- only using this as a monitor,
then it's not really going to be a problem
because you can just have HDMI info display on
and you can just see everything here on a bigger screen.
But if you're recording to this thing,
so you want a clean HDMI out, then you might find this one
to be a little bit cumbersome if you access the menu a lot
when you shoot. But there was another advantage of this method
which is that it cleared up some more space in the front
so that we could also attach a light.
For example, if you use this Aputure F7 here,
which is great because it can also be powered off of USB power
so we can use that USB port that we installed
in the side that we won't need if we're using a dummy battery
and it'll keep the weight down too because we're not putting
an NP-F battery on the front of the camera.
We could just slide this into the shoe
on the top of the handle here.
And then you have a few different position options.
You can have it vertical like this.
You can adjust the ball head that comes with the light.
And have it sitting down to the side like that
and you also have the tilt, so it's pretty versatile that way.
And then for a microphone, I've got the-- an on-camera
shotgun mic for instance works really well in this case.
This is the Deity V-Mic D3 Pro and I'm going to attach
that to this double ball head thing that they've got here.
And then what I like about this is that you can choose
your angle a little bit better.
You can get it specific pointing toward your subject.
Maybe, you know cant it in a little bit, up and down,
whatever, and you can also reach it a little bit further
forward so that you get a little bit better sound.
Plus the Atomos recorder makes a little bit of noise.
And the advantage here is that we're putting
the recorder pretty off-axis to the microphone
so you don't have to worry about it picking any of that sound up.
But even if we put the recorder up over here,
then we're still going to be on one of the most rejected
angles for a shotgun mic. So it all works out well
when it comes to sound very quiet, and the fact
that we can get the mic forward is great.
Once you have everything attached and connected
I highly recommend that you do some cable management
because this will be much easier than when you try
to hand-hold the camera.
You don't get all tangled up in cables.
There's a couple little grooves like the ones
on the bottom here you can hide the regulators,
but if you don't have these,
which are the Velcro cable ties from Amazon,
you definitely need to pick some of these up.
They're like $10 and you get hundreds of them
and they're infinitely useful when it comes to stuff
like this, and just in general around the house.
Anyway, one thing I like to do sometimes I Velcro
the cable to the handle, that way it's like really tight
along there and it adds a little bit of extra grip
if you want, doesn't bother me, but you can
also try Velcro-ing them along the sides of the cage.
But whatever you prefer just make sure that you strap
all those cables down, that way when you go from handheld
to the tripod and back and forth you don't have to
worry about getting tangled up in any of the wires.
I'll finish tidying up all the cables now,
and then I'll show you the completed build.
[funky upbeat music]
♪
Now let's talk about how long you'll get powering
all these devices at once. Surprisingly,
the longevity was pretty similar whether you're using the dummy
battery or using the USB power with a battery inside the Sony.
So in this configuration, which has a dummy battery
you get about 4 hours and 45 minutes until the battery
is depleted and everything turns off.
Alternatively, if you had a battery in the Sony
and you connected via USB, you would get five hours
until the battery depleted, which would turn the Atomos off
but the Sony would keep running
because there was a battery inside of it.
And if that battery was at 100% when you started,
after five hours I had about 44% left
on the Sony at the end of it. So it lasts 15 minutes longer.
So that's a bit of a pro, and the only real con is
that you'd have to manage two different types of batteries.
And if you did want to keep shooting with the Sony
afterwards, it would only be at 44% battery instead of 100%.
Now if you add the Aputure F7, that light that I tested,
into the mix then obviously you're going to get less time.
It was three and a half hours
with the Aputure F7 connected at full power
until everything turned off
and that's still pretty damn impressive considering
how many things we had running off of a single battery.
Now one more thing I wanted to mention
about the cable management is that
as you might have noticed you can hide the cables
underneath the LCD screen if you just lift it
up and away and tuck them in there and then you can kind of
pin the cables down a little bit with the screen.
Don't put too much force on it. But there's another benefit
here, which is that some of my tests have shown
in the past when I was just testing cameras
that having the LCD screen away from the body
can actually help with overheating.
Now I don't know how much that's going to benefit
if we have cables blocking the path,
but when I was doing these tests,
I never had a single issue with overheating or even
that pre-overheating warning light come on
and I did several of those five hour full recording time battery
rundowns and didn't experience any overheating at all.
But regardless of which power scenario you're using,
whether that's the USB power or the dummy battery,
I've been equally impressed with the longevity. And keep in mind,
this is just the single smallest capacity battery.
This is only the 98Wh version. In the description
you'll find one that I called the all-day battery,
that's the 170Wh version and that'll get you
at least eight hours of record time.
But there's even bigger ones if you need it.
Just make sure that you get or have a V-Mount battery charger.
I recommend one around 2.5A,
otherwise it takes way too long to charge these batteries.
But this whole thing gets even better
because you can actually actively power the system
using that D-Tap battery charger as well,
provided that you have a unit with enough amperage.
Lastly, let's talk about weight, mounting, and handling.
So you're gonna want to make sure that you position it
so that your rods and the quick release plate
that you use for your tripod or all set up so you find a nice
balance point. It needs to be configured in a way
where if you put it on your fluid head and you loosen
the tilt tension all the way down
that it's not going to fall forward or backwards but find
a balance, kind of like if you were balancing a gimbal.
If you can't do that, maybe it's too front heavy
or back heavy and it's tilting no matter where you put it,
then you might need to adjust your plate
or your rods in order to achieve that.
So, once you have it set up like that and you have it
all balanced, you should be able to quickly take it off
the tripod and then when you return it there
it'll be returned to its balanced position.
And hand holding the rig is actually been pretty decent.
I still have access on the right hand side here to hold this
and adjust any of the camera controls, and I'm able to just
grab it, kind of, underneath by the quick release plate.
And if you want to, the battery plate on the back here
actually acts as a sort of a third point of contact
if you want to have it against your chest and I found
that this gives actually really steady and stable shots
with more of a natural handheld look instead of the gimbal.
And I've been quite pleased with it. And you can also drop
for low shots as well by holding onto the handle
and then bring it low to the floor
and you might just have to adjust the angle
of your monitor, make sure that's all set up, but you can
get all the way down and shoot low like that
and still keep some of that organic movement.
And then when you're done you can just return it to the tripod
and it should lock back in and be nice and balanced.
Now if you're going to be carrying it handheld
for really long time, then you might consider getting
a shoulder pad for it because it's not exactly light.
It comes in at 4.1 kilos or nine pounds,
which I was pleasantly surprised by because I thought it was
definitely going to be over 10 pounds and I also find that
with the ubiquitous 502 head that I have here from Manfrotto
that this is a really nice weight for panning
and tilting on that one because often
With hybrid cameras they're a bit too light and I find
the fluid head movements to be not as nice as they could be,
but this weight is very, very good for pulling off
the same movements with a head this size.
Overall I'm really happy with how it turned out and I love
that I can shoot for as long as I want with more stable shots
and never worry about running out of power,
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found
this video helpful or at least entertaining.
And if you did make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright, I'm done.
♪