Filmmaking Gear I Was “Influenced” to Buy But I Low-key Regret

A NAS alone isn't a backup

peak design warranty no?

Some tripods are great.
I don't like all of them though.
Really heavy ones made of carbon fiber seem like the weight should be
Under the metrics of others.
I still have a lot of use for it but I won't be hiking in the back country with it.

The base plate has a focal plane marker...on the wrong side of the base plate...Ah well.
Should have sprung for the flowtech I guess.

I too was duped by all the Andycine and Feelworld monitor reviews early on. It wasn’t until I used a SmallHD for the first time that I had an “ohhhh that’s why” moment on the price difference 😂

I looked at that tripod when a friend boasted about how amazing it was. All the reviews from non influencers rip the thing apart, with the same issues you had. 

One thing I always do now is read the reviews on BH/Amazon etc before buying stuff. It shows real world usage, not something somebody was sent for free, only to make a 10 minute video on it and then sell it.

I would consider synology or qnap over drobo. Still get a Nas people. Synology is Apple friendly. Qnap has great hardware but security issues have been popping up.

I get by pretty good by looking for oddities used or at the goodwill... I've found nearly complete green screen fold out kits missing one screw, Manfrotto tripods, along with the ccasional Craigslist Ronins, and i try to always consider manufacturer refurbs.(IE: drones and lenses) makes up for the occasional stupidly mandatory $200 memory card... hard to skimp on those...

I have many of the same gear regrets. I wanted to give you the heads up - Drobo actually went out of business last year. I just had to swap my whole life’s work over to another system without the proprietary format.

For the price you paid for that Drobo.. and the drives, you could pickup a small computer with a bunch of drives and run Truenas (Opensource network storage device). You will get the redundancy you need, as well as the ability to archive to object storage (think Amazon AWS S3, Azure Storage, or any S3 compatable provider, Backblaze, I have no relation other than a user, is great, costs me about $0.50 a month for around 700GB of data, although there are costs associated with downloads, uploads are free, great for archiving)., which is great for photgraphy. Drobos are overpriced proprietary versions that lock you in. Stick with standards based (Synology) or opensource products.

Can't you use Peak Design's warrenty?

Exchange rate to canadians dollars is 1.30.... I mean C´MON!
HAHAHAHA, I laugh in southamerican exchange rate hahaha, mate, you're crazy, yeah, people is used to different living styles but.... what?

We need reviews from people who actually buy the stuff with their own money. Thanks for putting this into perspective!

Had a Drobo 5N2 NAS for several years. Worked well. Then they filed for Chapter-11, stopped supporting MacOS and rumors started that they were going under. With the dropping of MacOS support, I pulled my data off the 5N2 as fast as I could and then sold it on Craigslist. That’s a shame since I really liked it.

You have to replace the head on the PD. It's a great tripod. I use 3 CF PD for weddings and it fits the carry-on.

I have another tripod that is bulkier for regular gigs.

Are you looking to sell the Ronin add ons?

Wow! What an unfair rant against the Peak Design tripod!

I've been using my carbon fiber model almost daily for nearly two years. No issues whatsoever.

Are you not aware that Peak Design has a lifetime warranty? You don't mention it. Have you tried to get a repair or replacement?

As for its not have a gimbal head, there's an easy fix. Mount a Flexshooter gimbal head. Weighs little. Small dimensions. I use mine nearly everyday.

There's a reason so many counterfeit shops do knock-offs of Peak Design gear. Try getting a lifetime warranty from one of them.

Terrible Tri-pod. I can't believe people spend that much on them. People are so easily fooled lol

love the honest opinions here! always so great to hear. Where I don't use the raveneye because it's HDMI and I run a Komodo but the follow focus is actually really nice since my camera's autofocus is not great. but depends on the situation.

As much as I love the size of the Peak Design for travel, I have yet to stumble across any professional photographer or filmmaker in the field using it for their work.

Anyone running an Osee monitor. I have been pleasantly surprised with it.

Idk how others feel about this but I kinda regret buying a widescreen monitor.

Not enough height to view several tracks on the editing timeline - at least not for my taste.

Interesting list - Sometimes it's a challenge deciding on needs vs. wants or what you think you need.

I own a Peak Design tripod personally i love it, yes i have had things break on it but peak designs do hold a life time warranty on their gear if you contact them for repairs as thats how mine has been sorted. it may be something worth looking into.

Drobo is already out of business 😅

Pretty sure Drobo went out of business.

I found when I bought a Nas drive that it offers redundancy not a backup. It means you should be able to recover the drives, but the advice is to always backup to a second drive. The biggest benefit is chaining multiple drives for more storage

Your video made me think about gear I regret buying, and there is a lot. The one that comes immediately to mind is my powered slider. It is an excellent slider and it works really well; however, I don’t use it because it takes too much time to set up. I shoot live theatre, concerts and dance shows with 3 cameras normally. It usually takes me an hour to set up. In a lot of these theatres you have to set up in the audience seating which makes setting up the slider even more difficult. I also regret buying expensive video tripods because getting them into the seating area is very difficult.

Agreed on this one for sure. I bought a small monitor for the price and it’s absolute garbage. I should’ve just spent the extra 50 bucks on the better version, and I would actually be able to use the thing.

l’m glad I never bought the peak design tripod.

the exchange rate from brazil is like for every dollar you pay 5x more in BRL$ if you pay for someone to bring it for you, if you're lucky enough to afford it in brasil you pay 10x more

NEWS FLASH FROM JAN 2023: Drobo is out of business.

Is there any reason for getting a combined ND Mist filter over just using two separate filters in combination?

Nope. No enemies here. Bless you, you nailed it. I have the FX3 as well. I would love to dump my Ronin 2s, the "used twice" PD tripod, and thank god I never went for the matte box filters or 12k hard drive system. Hilarious how we all fell for the same gear! I also bought a Sachtler tripod...2k. Add that to the list hehe

My peak design tripod ballhead cannot hold the weight of my Tamron 150-600mm f5-6.3 g2 lens + canon R without the head slowly tilting downwards.

I also don’t trust it’s legs around water. They just feel so flimsy to me, tho granted I have not tested it by like throwing it in a river to get a pretty water photo, because I just do not trust it.

It really depends on what you're doing. The real trick is buying what works FOR YOU. For example fiction is WAY different from doco, and fiction commercials and doco commercials are each different again (more concerns with clients being able to see a pretty preview, less room for error, etc.) And then within that, there is your particular style. Ours is glossy and pretty and we do fiction, so we have a huge collection of diffusion filters. Someone else might have a more "real" style where diffusion doesn't work. We love the Raveneye for our much smaller crew shoots where someone is 2nd op and focus at the same time, but really it's often not enough, because ideally we want more than one remote monitor (focus, 2nd op, makeup/hair, client). There is no right answer for everyone.

Anyone here has experience with the Tilta lightweight shoulder rig? I need one for my FX3 Setup for doc, but my concern is that the Tilta rig will be difficult to balance & too lightweight for stable shots

I’m mostly a computer geek. I’ve never heard of “Drobo” but from your description, yea, I 100% agree. Never get proprietary storage. Remember “Bernoulli Box” and all the other Iomega products? Over the years, there has been a lot of weird disk / storage / backup concepts and they all come back to one thing. As soon as the company goes bankrupt, you must get all of your data to another format before your reader goes bad. As they say: Been there, done that. I still have the t-shirt.

With regards to “Mist” — remember back in the 80s porn the “soft focus”. Everything was soft focus for about 10 years and then it (thank God) went away. I put “Mist” into the same category.

I use a 1/8 mist filter because dirt just cuts the digits look a bit , I don't think it even really makes that crazy off a look , just smooths out my shots a bit

I got the Shinobi 7" monitor myself and I'm glad I did. I don't use it as much as I want to, yet. But I don't do enough video yet either. But I'm glad I didn't cheap out. However, I totally got the pro combo for my gimbal and have never used the follow focus and raven eye. Never even set it up. I've wanted to several times, but didn't have a use case for it. So it just sits in the case. Awaiting the day I'll use it 😂

Biggest waste of time and money was the Aputure DEC lens regain.

I love these videos. I wish more people would roast gear and even roast the shills who convince us to buy this stuff.

Drobo has been out of business for over a year now. I'm still using mine but looking for alternatives. So far I haven't been able to find anything as good as Drobo. :(

Good call on the Peak Design Tripod. I have several products from the Peak Design ecosystem that are well-designed and well-built. They've stood the test of time. A colleague bought the tripod and I was amazed at how crappy it was and at such a staggering price. It's virtually useless for filmmaking and stills shooters have much better options at much lower price points.

Hey
My drobo 5C just went out of service yesterday really joke asside it is turning on without my HDD discs spinning so my DAS is dead but the data still on the 5 4TB HDD ...so I will advise you to find a new backup system ASAP😅😅😅...
I purchased 2 * 22 TB HDD internal storage and mounted in my PC and with free programs I make one for my backup and the second one automatic mirroring of my backup...no need for Raid 1.
Raid protocols are not Backup just a safety to hot swap HDD in a server array when a HDD has a failure.
Droobo is really not bullet proof and use beyondraid protocols and proprietary Raid 5 protocols to optimise the plus side you can mix different size of HDD...minus is when the DAS or NAS is broken no way to fix it because compagny doesn't exist any more...and kind of difficult to rebuilt the Raid array...you need a special program and have no guatantee that it will work...I have like 12 TB to recover (I still have all the data on the second layer of HDD backup )
Will try the operation next week wondering if It can be done.
Double backup is a must for professional work...imho even with other compagnies likr Sygnology Qnap shit can happen...
And no need for expensive program for backup you have some cumborsome but good free of charges alternatives...
Grrat video by the way...
Tx
Yours
Fil

Agree with all of it. Made the same mistakes haha

so glad i never bought that peak design tripod.