35mm adaptor or nanoflash?

[Cris Daniels]

I don't see you running a Letus/RedRock 35mm Rig on a Steadycam. So the question is really what do you plan to do? And the 35mm adapters cant address the fact that the stock lens has some distortion on its widest side, so you are always going to be shooting through that limitation. If you have some control over your staging, the DOF is quite nice with the 1/2" chips, heck the 5D is almost TOO shallow sometimes IMO.

I used a Glidecam 4000 and the steadyshooter vest with my EX1 and it was an excellent setup.

The Nano will be excellent especially if you shoot scenes with lots of movement, for talking heads it can wait.

Probably the best bang for the buck is to build a dolly, and then get a Hi Hat from someone like Filmtools.com. I would not use PVC, but lots of people do. I used 10' 1.5" electrical conduit and welded in supports so that it looks like a real dolly track. but the 1.5" is rigid, and most of the time an apple box or crate under either end is all that is necessary, it will not sag and require all kinds of work to level like a PVC track. If you are working on various locations from rocks, to sand, to parking lots, the PVC is a pain.


Check out the Cineslider from Kessler Cranes, this thing is amazing. With two fluid heads (one on your tripod with the Cineslider attached and the other on the Cineslider itself) you can perform some excellent camera moves without help. No you cant jib up 10', but simply moving the camera down 2' while panning can add a lot of production value to a shot and it is something you can do without an assistant with this setup. It is also excellent for dollying on very tight long lens shots. The crank will allow you to pull the camera along smoothly, especially with a DSLR where a normal dolly is just too heavy duty and hard to control with so little weight (unless you sandbag the dolly).