Hamil Bros Studios

NAB 2018 Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of our NAB experience blog posts! If you missed part one, you can see it here!

Where next?

We packed so much into this day that it’s really hard to remember where all exactly we went. I’m going to do the best I can. We had to make sure and check in with our good friend, John Morgan and the Blueshape Battery family. If you keep up with us at all, you’ll see we post about our blueshape granite minis pretty often. Along from there we went down to the Flanders Scientific booth. Guys, these are the BEST color accurate monitors on the market. We had to run down and check out one of their soft cases that should fit our 25” onset monitor! We also got to meet Patrick Inhofer, a world renowned awesome colorist! He was on our list of people to shake hands with, so we crossed him off.

There was a lot of brief “Hey look, we use gear from them.” and kept walking. Some things to mention here, as scatterbrained as this all has become, the two vendors we felt like OWNED this show were Blackmagic Design and their new Pocket Cinema 4K camera and Atomos’ announcement of PRORES RAW. But we’ll get there.

Tentacle Sync


Tentacle Sync is going to get their own paragraph, because they’re awesome! You can check out their website here, but simply they’re an audio synchronizing hardware/software company that we’ve been following for years. In layman’s terms, these little units help sync your cameras to your off-camera audio units. If you’re really interested in it, we suggest you check out their website for more info. If you’re lazy or willing to wait, we’re going to be doing a gear review on Tentacle sync for all the nerds who want to know more. We got over to the booth, as this was HIGH on our list of things to check out. These guys and gals are totally awesome and so friendly. They simply explained the tech and updates to us. One thing we learned at NAB was to ask “Hey are you on instagram?” Just so you can connect with them and they can connect with you. So, I asked our Tentacle friends if they were on instagram and somehow we wound up being their 1,000th follower. They all got REALLY excited which got us excited. They told us they didn’t have anything for us currently, but asked if we would come back about 2 hours later. We agreed and went on our way. And now you have to read further on to find out what happened! *insert maniacal, evil genius laugh*

Matthews Studio Equipment

You may have seen a review we did for Matthews Studio Equipment’s (MSE) Master Car Mount. Well, through that, we cultivated a relationship with Tyler Phillips at MSE. NAB was finally an opportunity to meet Tyler and shake his hand! What an opportunity. Tyler showed us the latest and greatest in grip gear and camera support designed by Matthews. I think our favorite thing was the new Matthews Panel Stand. This is a combo stand designed for these longer/bulkier LED panels that are being designed and manufactured. Not only does this panel stand keep all the knuckles where you can reach them, you can literally set it up with one hand. Another great product that caught our eye was the Infinity Arm. This is not your regular articulating arm. We’ve had several that went bust over the years and are terribly unreliable. This arm is GREAT. You can’t over-tighten it, because instead of cables that will stretch and wear out, this arm has steel rods inside. In theory it should last forever. Also, to be VERY clear, this isn’t just an articulating arm, it was designed to be a grip tool to get you out of a jam. If you’re having to rig a camera or a light in tight quarters, this arm is there to help. Once you tighten it, it’s not going anywhere!

James Lee at 16×9

We wanted to meet a few of the guys who helped us in making Curse of the Were-Pa! James Lee was a BIG part of that short by letting us use a Movcam single motor remote follow focus. We headed over to the 16×9 inc booth and got to shake James’ hand. He showed us some pretty cool tech that they’re working on. They’ve integrated a finger wheel into the system for those of you who need to run focus as well as operate camera. They also work very closely with Angenieux so these systems are preset to integrate with the Angenieux zooms like the EZ-1 and EZ-2. This means focus, zoom, and iris control all at your fingertips, ready to go!

Rob and Tim at Bright Tangerine

Thanks to our good friend, Ryan Avery, we’ve gotten to make friends with our favorite matte box manufacturer. Bright Tangerine makes some absolutely crazy awesome carbon fiber matte boxes as well as other camera support accessories like follow focuses, articulating arms, etc. Getting to see Tim and Rob was really awesome. They’re great guys at a great company.

Tentacle sync part 2

Okay, okay, okay, you’ve waited long enough, now here’s the scoop. We made our way back to the Tentacle Sync booth and what did we get?? They handed us our FIRST Tentacle Sync pair. Brand new, never touched, as a ‘thank you’ for being their 1000th follower on Instagram. Not gonna lie, I teared up a little bit. It was an exhausting day and this really hit me hard. So to our new friends at Tentacle Sync, thank you so much for our set. We will use them often!

 

That pretty much wraps up our first day!

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