Here’s what we think are the Best iPhone 6 and 6s cases based on actually using the products
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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Cameras
Our videos are shot in two takes. The first take involves filming the narrative portion (including the intro) while the second portion involves shooting the product closeups and all other “fun shots”. The narrative portions are shot with a Canon 70D. We started the channel using the Canon 60D, but the lack of autofocus on the 60D was quite frustrating. The 70D’s autofocus was superb at the time (along with the face recognition focus feature) so setting up for a video was much simpler. We don’t plan on upgrading the 70D for a while.
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.
Get the Canon 70D on Amazon!
What are the prices on SanDisk SDHC cards on Amazon?
Lights
For the narrative shots, we use a 312 LED light from Fotodiox. The light is mounted to our Canon 70D’s via the hot shoe mount (though the Fotodiox is “cold”). The colour of the light can be adjusted from 3200k to 5600k and is powered by two F550 batteries (which is an easy battery size to come by). It can be plugged into the wall as well if you run out of battery power and comes with a diffuser that softens up the light a bit.
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?
Microphones
For microphones, we use Sennheiser EW 100 G3’s. We’ve been using the wireless mic’s since late 2013, and they work well. They are definitely a step up from the Rode Video Mic that we started out with in 2012 but with everything else, we’re constantly trying to make things better. We’ve got our eyes on a couple of hardware upgrades (we’re looking at a high-quality shotgun mic).
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!
Tripods
For the narrative shots, we use a 312 LED light from Fotodiox. The light is mounted to our Canon 70D’s via the hot shoe mount (though the Fotodiox is “cold”). The colour of the light can be adjusted from 3200k to 5600k and is powered by two F550 batteries (which is an easy battery size to come by). It can be plugged into the wall as well if you run out of battery power and comes with a diffuser that softens up the light a bit.
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.
Tiny Tripods
Those tiny tripods you see in our drop test videos? All the knobby tripods are various products called GorillaPod’s by Joby. Joby was awesome enough to sponsor us a couple of mounts last year.
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!
Action Cam
When we first started Mobile Review Eh!, we used a GoPro Hero 3 to capture the slow motion video from our drop tests. That quickly changed with the iPhone 5s as it captured better video for our reviews. We tried to use the Hero 3 from a POV perspective but couldn’t get over how awkward Aaron looked with the GoPro mounted strapped to his head.
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.
Video Editing setup
We edit all our videos in Final Cut Pro X on a Macbook Pro Retina (Mid-2012). Aaron’s been using Final Cut products since the early 2000’s so it was just easier to go with something that we were familiar with. The most annoying thing about Final Cut Pro X that we’ve found is the in-ability to eject an external disk without quitting FCPX (seriously Apple?).
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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