Nick’s Top Picks NAB 2018

It’s the morning after a long night out in Vegas, and you wake up next to a brand new Arri Alexa and a set of Cooke Prime lenses… Don’t we all know that feeling? Well, what happens in Vegas actually ends up on the company expense report, so rather than getting swept up in the excitement of NAB Show 2018, Nick has put together his Top Picks of NAB.

We are back from a fun time in Vegas at NAB!  We were there for two full days and saw a lot of cool stuff. Two days isn’t nearly enough- next year we’ll have to do the full four days.

       Here are Nick’s Top Picks.

       What seemed like the theme of NAB this year was RGB lights. They’re everywhere!  The coolest one, I thought, was from Hive; they have their very cool Wasp 50-C light. It’s great as a little accent light. They’ve they’ve had a 100-C out for a few years now, and this is just a smaller slightly less expensive version. It’s the perfect size for something that we’d use for accent lighting. The Wasp that we have in our collection is the 250, a really big and quite powerful light. The 50-C isn’t quite like that, it’s more of an accent light.

       Another cool light was from Kinotehnik- their Practilite 802. It’s an LED panel that’s half the size of a 1×1, but with the same output. It just seems like it’s a lot better designed than most 1x1s. It’s also waterproof, so you can shoot out in the rain with it- no problem!  It’s nothing crazy, just a very, very well designed light.

       Here’s one with an odd name: Syrp!  They’re the Australian company that makes the Magic Carpet Pro, which is a camera slider, and the Genie II, which is a motion control system that goes with the Magic Carpet. The cool thing about the Magic Carpet is that you can buy the slider in sections… So they have a 2 foot and a 3 foot section, but you can connect those together to get a 5 foot slider. Even a 12 foot slider; you can mix match every one. The carriage also has a flywheel on it, so it’s very smooth. When you pair that with the Genie II, it allows you to make a full motion control system so you do cool time lapses, or you can just have a camera doing automated computer moves.

       One thing that I wasn’t expecting to like was the lineup from Backstage Equipment. They make lots of carts and the like, and it all seemed fantastic. We saw a lot of carts at NAB, but, by far, the Backstage Equipment ones jumped out of me. They’re very well built and seem very reasonably priced for what you’re getting. They had a cart made specifically to transport c-stands around… and if you’ve ever had to move c-stands, you know they’re very heavy!  Being able to move ten of them around no problem- that’s kind of a huge deal. Their booth did not even require an exhibit or a backdrop. Their display was just all of the products. They displayed all of their carts fully loaded with baby stands, junior stands, some combo stands… Once the video guys see that, they really go for it.

       The last thing is a product that’s already been on our radar for some time: the Canon C200. We love our C100 and our C300, though there are a few little things here and there that we just felt could be improved, and it seems the C200 improves all of them. The body is much better designed, and it adds some cool features like 4k 60p and Canon’s Cinema Raw Light, so it takes something that we already love and makes it even better.

       What’s more, we saw some other products at NAB this year that would make the C200 even better!

       One of these is from Wooden Camera. It’s their Arri Rosette Quick Release. This is something that sits between the handle under the camera and the camera itself which allows you to rotate the handle with just the push of a button. It’s perfect to quickly adjust to high shots or low shots. To do that with our C100 now, you have to loosen the handle, adjust it, tighten it back up… which might only take 20 seconds, but if you’re just getting one shot, it’s not worth doing. This could make that a lot easier.

       The last item is the Atomos Ninja 5. It’s a 5” recorder with 1,000 nits of brightness on the monitor, making it usable outside. You could hook it up to a C200 and get your 10 bit 422 ProRes. While the C200 is great, that’s not a format that you could record internally. Pairing the C200 up with those two items would give you a really nice camera package.

       Roaming the NAB Show floor was time well spent!  We were doing our homework for a lot of gear that we will be buying, and it’s always helpful to get your hands on gear before you make the purchase.

       We liked Arri, we liked RED, we liked Blackmagic and Sony and Panasonic, and checking out the latest from those manufacturers is always a blast, but being rewarded for doing quite a bit of production with the Canon C Series gets us very excited about the purchase of the new Canon products. While we’re not closed off to any other manufacturers, Canon’s always done well by us.

       We had a great time at NAB, and thank you for coming with us on such a fun adventure!  These were Nick’s Top Picks. There is a lot more gear to come here on Gear Time, and a lot more we’re going to add to the collection here at Mosher Media.