Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Did LMG Switch to RED cameras?”.
I would love to see a piece on how your cameras evolved from NCI to now and why you chose those cameras. No, I can just do that now. I’M planning my own Indie video/ podcast company and would like to avoid the obvious pit holes red yeah. I mean I wouldn’t call the Reds a pitfall um I I can. I can speak at length justifying the the the red purchase um.
We learned a lot. Oh yeah, we learned a lot about just you know: production workflows and huge infrastructure. Improvements happened at that time. To be able to handle the footage which is still helpful today, which we still use now that so we we got ahead of what we needed at the time at our scale.
But now that we’ve scaled up, we use a lot of the same processes and a lot of the same infrastructure, um or or very similar infrastructure, uh yeah. So we start okay, anyway, back to I started with a vlogging camera with just a microphone built into it. That was perfect for what I was doing at the time, because I’ve always I’ve always said content is King. You should you should use whatever camera you have and you should try to make the best content you can uh from there. We used the a handy Cam that the NC boss gave his kids and they didn’t use. So we we adopted it and then, when we started Linus Media Group, I got a Sony fs700, knowing that it was 1080p today and that there would be a 4K upgrade in the future that ended up being a long and winding road with various external recorders. I remember we had an odyssey 7q or s at some point was an external recorder that used ssds, because I was super determined to not use proprietary media.
It looked at the time like was it SE fast that was going to no. I think that was this was pre C fast. I can’t remember what the hotness fast media was supposed to be at the time, but um there were other cameras like the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. We we did end up with one of those at some point. For some reason that used an internal SSD like a SATA SSD that was super cool, so the fs700.
We had a couple iterations of external recorders and then that I never really talked about this publicly, but that was stolen um, which was which was pretty upsetting. For me, because that camera had a lot of sentimental value, sure did um. For me, it went through a lot with us. We had to get it firmware upgraded in order to support 4K and we had to get like.
I forget if we had external audio recording for that one as well anyway, from the fs700 um we went to. I believe I want to say straight to the Reds, because uh there was an overlap and then I think we hm you know what I might not. Actually remember, we might have gone for like the slightly downgraded, not quite an fs7 or maybe we were shooting on black magic cinema cameras or pockets in the interim crap. I can’t go through this. I don’t remember everything I thought I did anyway. We got the Reds and that was very easily justifiable. We made a ton of content not just about the cameras themselves, but also about all the different things that we learned about and workflow stuff and just having 8K footage around uh to experience informed us about. You know how useful it was and how valuable it was. We we often used the higher resolution footage to punch in in post without necessarily giving up visual quality uh there’s there were lots of things that were super great about those cameras, but we’ve moved on. We we went to the Blackmagic 12K cameras that ended up being kind of a disaster, because their lowlight performance wasn’t very good and uh. The footage was even more difficult to handle and then we since then have moved on to Sony um. Oh crap.
I forget the name of them: yeah, fx3s and FX sixs. Are they FX? I know their fx6 is done, uh you anyway, you can see all our current stuff in the Gerald undone Studio, Tour that he did Rec recently and the reason that we like those is that they can take good audio into camera up to four channels, which is Really useful, when we have multiple hosts, the footage is pretty easy to work with they’re pretty reliable. They record to they record to SD, hey Dan. At some point, we were using uh something that had like external USBC ssds, and we had just a ton of problems with those um.
We used a lot of A7 s’s for a long time. Now we don’t use those anymore because Sony has their fx3, which is kind of like a more professional a7s. Um yeah super super boring to me I guess, but I’m not really much of a camera gear Head. I just am like: okay does this meet our business needs, which has been in a way really interesting for me as well, because it helps me to see the things that I am enthusiastic about through that lens.
So, for me, a computer is like cool, but then I have to step back. Can I have to go okay if it was a camera? How would I see it? Well, what’s its function, what’s its cost? Is there a long-term Roi? What can we do with our old equipment to uh uh to reduce some of the cost of this upgrade blah blah blah? It’S uh, it’s it’s! It’S not that I am less enthusiastic about computers now, it’s more that it just helps me understand multiple perspectives when I’m looking at them. .