Unsexy but essential video production gear

Essential video production gear often means the latest camera, lens, gimbal, or similar object of desire. Something shiny and sexy, with higher numbers than the last essential shiny, sexy thing. However, there are some decidedly mundane items that no video or filmmaker should be without.

Entering the world of video production or filmmaking, call it what you will, normally involves two developing passions. The first is an all-consuming passion for the moving image. The second is an equally all-consuming passion for the kit involved. We love it and lust after it! From lenses to LED panels and from sliders to shotgun mics. The latest, greatest, biggest, and best, are all the stuff that dreams are made of and bank balances decimated by. Our gear is our bling, and long may it shine!

We cannot live by bling alone.

What I want to look at in this article are the less shiny, less lust-worthy, and arguably downright boring items of equipment. Those things that may not stir anything in our gear-obsessed groins, but are stalwarts of our kit list. They are the unsung heroes of our gadget bags. Arguably crucial to the success and sanity of hardworking movie makers. So, I’ve compiled a list of 10 unglamorous essentials that I think should be as high on your shopping list as any camera, lens, field recorder, or gimbal. The list is certainly not exhaustive, however. I’m sure many of you will have your own thoughts on other items that you feel should make the cut.

Several of the items mentioned definitely fall under the heading of if I’d known then what I know now. I’ve certainly had my share of Homer Simpson-style ‘DOH!’ moments. And on several occasions, I’ve also swallowed the bitter pill dispensed by false economy.

Anyhow, without further ado, here we go with ten items of boring but essential video production gear.

Essential video production gear list:

Tripod.

Number one is the humble tripod, or to be more precise, a combination of tripod and video head. No matter how action-packed and dynamic your movie productions are, sometimes you need your camera still, stable and safe. In addition, there are times when you want to pan or tilt your camera smoothly. To do this, you need a decent tripod and head combo. I say a ‘decent’ because you might be tempted to go cheap, saving your hard-earned cash for something more exciting. This is a mistake!

The Manfrotto 504. At circa £450 it may seem expensive, but in reality it’s pretty much entry-level for a pro specification video head.

There are several criteria that a tripod should meet as an absolute minimum. There are also a few more that are extremely desirable. If you shoot outdoors, your tripod needs to be rigid enough to hold your gear still in a moderate wind. If it isn’t, vibration will show in your footage, particularly at longer focal lengths, which amplify the effect of movement.

Heads up!

The head’s tilt mechanism needs to be strong enough to hold your camera at any vertical angle, without sagging. This can wreck that perfect high or low angle shot. Adjustable tension on both the pan and tilt mechanism will help keep your camera movements smooth. They also enable you to come to a stop during a tilt without having to lock the mechanism off. In addition, an adjustable counterbalance for the tilt helps to accommodate different setup weights. As a general rule, the more capable your camera system is, the heavier it is. This puts increased stress on your video head.

Life’s a half-ball.

A half-ball leveling mechanism may not seem that crucial if your shoot is fairly static. However, if you’re changing position frequently, you’ll soon tire of leveling your tripod by adjusting its legs. Leveling a tripod is best done without the weight of an attached camera. This means that a solid, but easy to activate quick-release system is worth every penny. And, of course, if you’re trying to level your tripod, a reliable built-in spirit level is extremely useful. Between them, these refinements could save you hours of frustration over the life of the system.

She’s got legs.

You will need to adjust the length of your tripod legs to capture high and low-angle shots. Therefore it’s important that the leg release mechanism is easy to operate. A good height range is also highly desirable. This will let you shoot over the top of crowds, or low to the ground. for example. Weight can be a problem on a long shoot with lots of moving around. This is where carbon fiber legs come into their own.

Cost.

The bad news is that you’re not going to get all the above for £49.99 from Amazon. Reliable, versatile tripod and head combos start in the region of £500. This rises to thousands for models capable of supporting heavier cinema cameras adequately. Bargains do occasionally appear on eBay, so it’s worth keeping an eye out once you’ve identified a few likely contenders. There is some good news, however. A good tripod and head system will serve you well for decades, unlike much of your gear. This means a solid investment.

You’ll be glad to hear that this is the costliest recommendation in my list of essential video production gear. Most of the remaining items are available for tens rather than hundreds or thousands of pounds.

White balance card

You may have spent hours wrestling with your editing software, at some point, trying to colour match footage. If you have, you’ll understand the unquestionable wisdom of using a white balance or grey card. They serve two purposes. Firstly, they enable you to set an accurate manual white balance in-camera. This is advisable because auto white balance can be easily fooled by elements within the frame.

Much can be done in post-production to correct white balance inaccuracies. However, setting your white balance ensures that your camera is playing in the right ballpark. This can speed up post-production colour correction considerably. Secondly, placing a white/grey card in the frame at the start of each clip provides a consistent reference. This makes using software white balance tools much easier. A sheet of white paper or cardboard will do the trick to some degree. However, there are thousands of variations on white when it comes to paper!

The Colour Confidence folding grey card. Really serious improvements to the quality of your video production for less than £20.00

Cheap as chips.

For very little money, you can purchase a calibrated white or grey card, which folds down into a pocketable pouch. These have reliable white and grey surfaces for colour balance and, as a bonus, tend to have focusing targets. I also use my pop-up white balance card to help shade my camera monitor in bright conditions.

If you want to go even further, a colour checker card gives you a number of colour patches, including white and grey.  Again, these are of a known value, that can help you to manage colour consistency with greater accuracy and ease. 

Microphone Shock-Mounts

Unless your external microphone, camera mounted or boomed, is going to remain absolutely static, you need a shock mount. Otherwise, even the slightest handling noise will be recorded. Fortunately, some mic manufacturers supply shock-mounts with their products. However, if your mic is supplied without one, you’ll need to invest in a suitable third-party device. Rycote is probably the best-known shock mount manufacturer in the industry, with a reputation for excellent products. While a good shock-mount will cost upwards of £50, it will prove to be worth its weight in gold. It will prevent all but the very worst handling vibrations from reaching your mic and wrecking your audio tracks.  Good quality shock-mounts will last indefinitely if looked after. 

Dead cats – my only furry choice for essential video production gear.

In the context of essential video production gear, a dead cat isn’t a gift from your friendly neighbourhood felinophobe. A windshield or windjammer (its proper name) uses fibers to disrupt airflow into your mic. This reduces the likelihood of wind noise being generated. When filming outdoors, a dead cat is pretty much essential on any mic. This is because even a gentle breeze will play havoc with your audio, while anything stronger may render it unusable. Dynamic microphones tend to be considerably less sensitive than condensers, but stronger winds will also affect them. It’s possible to use a high pass filter to remove wind noise during post-production. However, this often needs to be set at such a high frequency, that the resulting audio is affected badly.

The ubiquitous Rycote Softie. An industry standard for furry windshields.

While many mics are supplied with a foam windshield, this is unlikely to be up to the job of filming outdoors. Some mic manufacturers supply both a foam windshield and a dead cat with their products. However, more commonly than not, the latter will need to be purchased separately. Again, Rycote products have an excellent reputation in this area. In conditions where the wind is really blowing, a blimp-type windshield will be necessary. This can be used in conjunction with its own furry dead cat for ultimate protection from wind noise.

C Stands

Century stands are one of those how did I ever get by without them? items of essential video production gear. They seem completely OTT in terms of design, cost, and above all weight. However, it’s this last quality that makes a C stand so incredibly useful. C stands were originally used to hold 100” square reflectors known as Centuries. In the early days of Hollywood, these were used to reflect natural light entering a studio through skylights. Today, they find more uses than a Swiss Army knife.

C stands can support lights, overhead mics, overhead cameras, backgrounds, acoustic blankets, and so on. They are the first-call device when a take no sh*t approach to overcoming gravity is required. While I own and use a whole load of fold-away lighting and background stands, it’s C stands that are my go-to. I keep a pair in the back of the car pretty much permanently. C stands are heavy, stable, and versatile. They can make all the difference between having absolute confidence and praying for the best.

C stands. Always ready to take the strain!

Quality mic cables.

Cheap, nasty mic cables are a false economy, period. In my experience, their cable tends to be more prone to kinks, their connectors are more prone to failure. They can affect audio quality through signal loss and susceptibility to radio frequency interference. I’m not suggesting that every single cable you own needs to be the very highest spec available. However, if you’ve invested large sums in audio hardware, using bargain-basement XLR leads doesn’t make sense.

Choice of lengths.

In terms of flexibility, I’ve always found it useful to carry mic cables of various lengths. For example, I have a couple of very short, 0.3M cables for the odd occasion when I camera mount a mic. In addition, I have cables that are 3M, 6M, and 10M long. I’ve always found that there’s a kind of Goldilocks criteria to running cables around a set. If they’re too long, you have coils of cable snaking around the place, needing to be managed. If they’re too short, you have hanging cable just waiting to snare someone, who then pulls either your mic or camera to the floor. Ouch! Better that they’re just the right length for the job and can be managed neatly.

I avoid daisy-chaining shorter mic cables together, as I’ve traced unwanted noise to cable joints far too often. Buying so many mic cables may seem like an unnecessary expense. However, I doubt I’ve spent more than a few hundred pounds on XLR cables in total. That’s small potatoes next to the £1000s I carry in other gear. Besides: it means I always have spares.

Good quality microphone cables are essential to a clean audio path and will outlive their bargain-basement counterparts.

Black cables aren’t always best.

Somewhat counterintuitively, I like to use brightly coloured cables on set. If I’m using multiple mics, colours help me to trace individual lines easily. Also, if I’m working quickly and moving around, I don’t have time to repeatedly gaffer tape cables down. In these circumstances, cables that show up against the floor are generally a good idea. Bright yellow or dayglow green cables may not be discreet. However, if you’ve rigged your mics properly, the cables won’t be visible on-screen anyway. Having said that, I do carry a couple of black XLRs for when circumstances demand it.

Spare batteries.

No list of essential video production gear would be complete without mentioning spare batteries. Batteries fail, batteries run down, particularly at low temperatures. Almost everything we use in video production or filmmaking is battery-powered. This includes cameras, field monitors, wireless transmitters, portable lighting, etc. Working on the basis of if it can happen it will, it’s foolish not to carry spares. In addition, every battery you use should be charged and checked before each shoot. I can’t think of anything more annoying than ending a shoot because a vital piece of kit is running out of juice.

In the case of cameras, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend buying multiple OEM batteries, as they can be outrageously expensive. However, I would steer clear of the very cheapest clones, as they’re likely to prove unreliable. Check out reviews and user forums, and then choose non-OEM batteries that have a good track record. I’ve personally had very good service from Hedbox batteries in my Panasonic camcorders. These run at about 25% of the price of their OEM counterparts. This makes a mid-capacity 7800 mAh battery around £80 rather than £320 for the nearest Panasonic equivalent.

Midget gems.

If you use anything that runs on AAs, I thoroughly recommend Panasonic Eneloop rechargeable batteries. I’ve used these for years in everything from audio recorders to speedlights and transmitters. I find that they work every bit as well as single-use batteries and that they hold their charge indefinitely when stored. I have some Eneloops that are circa ten years old and that I must have recharged literally hundreds of times. They’re expensive, but definitely an example of getting what you pay for.

Panasonic Eneloop rechargeable AA batteries. A great example of getting what you pay for.

Headphones.

If like me, you’re a solo shooter, you’re also your own soundman. As any soundman knows, being able to monitor your audio clearly is crucial to the job. To do this you need a decent pair of closed-back, over-ear headphones. These are sometimes described as extreme isolation headphones. Extreme isolation headphones don’t necessarily offer ultimate fidelity, but that’s not what’s needed. You do need to hear what your microphone is capturing; clearly, and above the level of general noise.

Open-backed headphones let in far too much ambient sound to be of any use whatsoever. Likewise, the very last thing you should use for audio monitoring is noise-canceling headphones. This is because they’re likely to filter out hums, hisses, reverb artifacts, and other nasties, that you need to hear. Otherwise, these sounds will be recorded, because you were completely unaware of them.

The good news is that pro-level isolating headphones can be found for less than £100. They can be found in the product lines of all major manufacturers. If looked after, they will last indefinitely, providing a good return on your investment. I’ve always been very fond of using Sennheiser headphones, as a full inventory of user-serviceable spares is readily available if you do happen to tread on them.

Good closed-back or ‘extreme isolation headphones are essential to monitoring audio during a shoot. These should not be confused with noise-canceling designs, which could filter out a lot of ambient sounds that you really need to hear.

On-camera storage.

There’s one thing worse than running out of battery during a video shoot: running out of storage for your footage. Multiple takes of even a relatively short scene or interview can chew up storage quickly. This is particularly true when shooting at higher definitions, frame rates, and bit rates. O.K. you can always stop, trawl through your clips, find the redundant ones and then delete them. This would obviously make space for your shoot to continue. However, chances are that everyone else will have gone home by the time you’re ready to resume filming. Pausing for a few seconds to slip a new SD card into your camera or field recorder is another matter.

As a general rule, I carry enough storage to allow my cameras to run constantly throughout the scheduled shoot. In other words, without allowing for any re-set, rehearsal, or break times. This means that I always have plenty of storage to spare. After a day’s shoot, I remove my cards and store them until I’ve had time to copy all of the footage to my RAID array. I always have two copies of my footage secured, because my cameras shoot to two SD cards simultaneously. If I have to do any more filming in the meantime, I use a different set of cards.

Off-camera storage.

My final choice of essential video production gear is hard drive storage. Having spoken about the importance of on-camera storage, having plenty of off-camera storage available is also vital. This is particularly true if you’re working on multiple ongoing projects. It’s also important if you want to store projects in editable form, ready for revision at a later date. While it’s a great idea to have super-fast SSD storage for editing, this isn’t necessary for long-term storage. With HDDs still running at a fraction of the cost of SSDs, it makes sense to use these instead.

While expensive at the outset, a good RAID array, with swappable drives will pay dividends. It will give you the convenience and security of automatic backup and failing HDDs can be swapped out easily. I’d recommend an absolute minimum of 2TB primary storage, with 2TB as a backup, or a 4TB RAID 1 array. However, more realistically, I’d suggest doubling this. 

The LaCie 2Big RAID drive. Capacity and data security all in one package.

Essential video production gear. Conclusion.

For me, the above list is a little like the wheel bearings, differential, and fuel injectors on a car. No one will ever really notice them, admire them, covet them or compliment you on them. You’re never going to get excited by them and will never consider them a point of pride. However, without them, all the good stuff quickly struggles where it really matters. Neglect them at your peril.

See more advice on audio equipment. 

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