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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

V Raptor mounting options?

B_Holmes

B_Holmes

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With the Red Components back ordered, what base plate With LW rods and top handles are compatible?

thx
 
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I hate to say it but the monitor mount is really cheesy.
The Red / small HD is great. The mount is a problem.
 
I went GDU quick release on bottom and ran 15mm rails on the top out front off of the Kippertie chin-strap on my komodo (i.e. timmy ribs side mounts). Its not standard height per-say but I've grown to like this setup. I am assuming you could adopt the same mentality with your V-Raptors. I have ran large cine-zooms with 3 focus motors on one rail (can swap different lengths in and out for prime vs zoom lenses) or add a second rail on the other side no problem and have grown to like not having a huge baseplate and rails on the bottom raising the height and weight of the camera. It's really nice for gimbal use as the camera basically stays set-up as a modular payload (just remove monitor).
 
I'm a fan of the Wooden Camera baseplate kit for Komodo. It works just as well on V-Raptor, although I wish the arca camera plate itself was a tad longer.

One of the best parts is the hole on the arca plate that lets you add a support post for lens adapters.
 

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Does anyone else find it insanely frustrating that you can buy a flagship camera from a company but can't get any accessories for it? I dealt with this once with Komodo during its inception and prefer to never deal with it again. This is a BIG reason why I am not getting V-Raptor for a while, if at all.... When a product comes to market in a professional industry, I expect to be able to order all the accessories needed to allow the camera to function in a fashion that allows it to serve its use case. Even more frustrating when celebs / fanboys / known industry leads get access to said parts (which are on backorder or out of stock coming soon) when those of us who would actually need to make money with said flagship camera (majority of V-Raptor and Komodo Owner/Ops) to recoup our initial investment dollars are left waiting in the dark without access to reliable parts that are necessary in most professional workflows... Frustrating to say the least.
 
Well, I too am waiting for some parts such as a cage to show up, that are perfectly tailored for the V-Raptor in particular, but its' not that I can't use it until those are available. So far, I got everything rigged up properly for whatever I wanted to shoot with parts laying around the house, NATO rails etc.
 
Andrew Reese said:
Does anyone else find it insanely frustrating that you can buy a flagship camera from a company but can't get any accessories for it? I dealt with this once with Komodo during its inception and prefer to never deal with it again. This is a BIG reason why I am not getting V-Raptor for a while, if at all.... When a product comes to market in a professional industry, I expect to be able to order all the accessories needed to allow the camera to function in a fashion that allows it to serve its use case. Even more frustrating when celebs / fanboys / known industry leads get access to said parts (which are on backorder or out of stock coming soon) when those of us who would actually need to make money with said flagship camera (majority of V-Raptor and Komodo Owner/Ops) to recoup our initial investment dollars are left waiting in the dark without access to reliable parts that are necessary in most professional workflows... Frustrating to say the least.
Click to expand...

I know this gets said ad nauseam, but just keep in mind that the supply chain issue is very real and not getting much better at the moment.

​​​​​I think the accessory manufacturers may be taking a play out of Red's book regarding the Raptor release. When Komodo came out, they announced it but had little supply to meet the demand, and it still hasn't caught up. With Raptor, they made sure to build a ton of units ready to be shipped before the official announcement.

I'm assuming the accessory makers would rather announce their Raptor products after they've built enough stock, to avoid the headache of customers furiously emailing, "I ordered my raptor cage 3 months ago, where the heck is it"

Plus, as Alex said above, the camera is already pretty riggable right out of the box. Especially compared to Komodo. The only critical Red official accessory, in my eyes, is the DSMC3 Touch. Arguably that expander blade as well, which is indeed frustratingly unavailable right now, to your point.
 
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I understand the supply chain shortages during the heat of the Covid pandemic when everyone was not working in isolation, but almost a year and a half later and folks are back to work, I am not quite buying it as an overall excuse anymore... I strongly believe that most industries have reached a point beyond the excuse of "supply chain shortage" and have adopted a mindset of "this is how it will be going forward, get used to it".

I see it everywhere in my engineering line of work, not just in the camera industry... Manufacturers have simply figured out it's easier on them if we (consumer) are expected to pre-order and wait for said company to build demand for "X" amount units before they send that cumulative purchase order out to their 3rd party manufacturer / assembler (i.e. machinist), instead of said manufacturer investing in "X" amount units of stock in order to have units ready for purchase at release of a new camera. Manufacturers simply do not want to put "skin into the game" investing in raw material and building pre-demand product any more than they have to and figured out if we all don't complain and get used to waiting half a year for parts to fit a camera that came out 6-months ago, then they can save a heck of a lot of money all on our dime. Thats your "2022 supply shortage" IMO...

I am really not trying to complain or bash V-Raptor or RED overall as a company, as that's really what this post and a few prior have sounded like, but the sad reality is even if I purchased a new DSCM3 V-Raptor brain, I wouldn't be able to use the camera to begin to immediately re-coup my initial investment due to a lack of available accessory support.... So where does that leave smaller owner/operators like me....the blue collar guy who grew their business off of being able to afford and ultimately leverage their first RED camera? Not sure about most V-Raptor owners, but I would actually need to make money with my camera, not just play and do tests with it for Youtube for the first several months I owned it....

For example, I have over 12 AB gold mount batteries and several AB brand chargers (not cheap), which to me was both a significant but smart investment as a small owner/operator into what I thought was an "industry standard" battery type.... Considering there was no fixed Gold Mount option available for Raptor (Strike One) and no AB adaptor option available, outside of adding a chunky looking expander module onto a camera I would have essentially wanted to keep small and rock-solid (i.e. wasn't that the point to make Komodo and V-Raptor smaller than DSCM2) rather than have it become as large as my DSCM2 build with reduced reliability (V-mount to AB adaptor) just to use industry standard batteries and get a few extra D-taps? Which again, I can't even do at this time because it's not available (Strike Two)....

So I guess my answer is to sell my entire collection of AB batteries and buy all new V-Mount batteries just to jump into the DSCM3 ecosystem, which was supposed to "integrate" with the DSMC2 ecosystem, which I had already invested significantly (what some people pay for a car) in years ago? Taking this lead I could go on about how not a single DSCM2 accessory works with DSCM3, even though that was the whole reason to buy into the DSMC2 future proofing modularity marketing at inception (Strike Three).

Same goes for locking PL/ EF interchangeable mounting solutions (Strike Four) for those of us who run large or heavy cinema lenses with focus motors and aren't into RF glass? Myself and I know many others who have come to heavily rely on and trust the titanium EF / PL DSCM2 mounts, especially when hanging rented zoom lenses that cost in upwards of $50-75k (insured or not) off the back of a lead / follow car on a gimbal. Therefore is it too much to expect solid mounting solutions that I can rely on simply to have peace of mind on a job? Just now, after what....almost 6-months from release of V-Raptor, I can now finally get on a waiting list for body mounting accessories that will allow you to mount a revolva or adapta PL / EF mount to V-Raptor (i.e. ignite DIGI / Kippertie). However keep in mind, Kippertie still hasn't officially announced or even commented on if the Komodo Revolva is truly compatible and meant for a VV sized sensor or if they will be releasing a V-Raptor specific version (it's been pretty quiet in that regard)... and they don't even have a dedicated page to V-Raptor accessories yet, as you have to google search to find the hidden products links to buy them on their website.

Then there was the whole CF Express media shortage shortly after release of V-Raptor, where so many couldn't even get appropriate media solutions for the camera. The exact same thing happened with Komodo at initial release when I bought mine with CF media shortages and don't forget the Canon BP battery shortage. I literally can go on and on about scenarios where I could have easily been left in the dark without functioning accessories for weeks if not months, if I bought V-Raptor at initial release back in September 2021 when everyone pre-ordered and it sold out without anyone ever seeing a single ounce of footage (talk about crazy FOMO). Even today in January 2022, you still cannot get all the parts you need to have a truly functioning A-cam in a single order or even several smaller orders from various re-sellers, and again will be left waiting and ultimately hoping as parts come in. I dealt with this with Komodo too familiarly, and it was really frustrating to say the least when you are excited to get a new camera, but then can't use it to its full functionality and even worse begin to lose money on it as it sits waiting for parts to come in...

So how are smaller individual (non-agency / non-production-house / non-rental-house) owner/operators like myself actually using this camera to make money, as I question how that is possible when there just simply aren't a lot of options out there available for V-Raptor to get this camera to be able to appropriately do everything thing it should be able to do out of the box at the time or purchase (i.e. media shortages, no AB solution, inaccessible lens mounting accessories, lack of available focus motor cables, timecode cables, lack of rec-trigger functionality, top plates, top handles, cages, baseplate / rail options, etc.

It's quite simple... in order for me to jump into DSCM3 I would want to sell my DSCM2 build, but in order for that to happen I would need to have faith and confidence in DSCM3's ability to function as reliably and professionally as DSCM2 and that is not the case. Simply because DSCM2 works as required, whereas at this time I wouldn't even be able get my hands on reliable accessories for V-Raptor to do everything a big-boy cam should be able to do...
 
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Never before have I had so many items that I’ve already paid for but not received due to pre order status or out of stock status. And this is for all film industry manufacturers not just Red and not just camera acc. It’s pretty ridiculous right now.

That being said I am fortunate to have an ideal solution to mounting full sized 3 stud or vlock batteries with my Teradek bolt TX, that I need on their 90% of the time anyways, and after about 30 min on Amazon plus diggin thru the old parts bin, I was able to piece together enough for 15 LWS, quick release and comfortable side handles, rented 4 CFexpress cards with no problems and had a very successful commercial shoot a couple weeks ago with my Raptor rented to production.

I know my situation is different than others and their needs different from mine so I can definitely understand the frustrations across the board. I’m still waiting on my I/o blade and my Raptor base plate kit and 2tb CFexpress cards after all, though Im aware of 3rd party camera control breakout boxes that are noted to work as well as other mounting solutions that will work in the mean time.

At least we all have the advantage here. We all have the option to use our dsmc2 setups and not jump on Raptor till it’s ready 100% including 3rd party options. No client of mine has mentioned a need to use the brand new Red camera over the old one. Supply chain or not, all manufacturers are having issues delivering products right now and I wouldn’t expect that to change soon, so buy all the temporary not perfect parts you need now to start getting the roi on your Raptor. I personally opted to dive in and sell both my dsmc2 kits cause I knew I could make a lot more selling them before the used market got flooded. If I needed to have production rent for a shoot or 2 then it’s still more profitable. That turned out greatly to be the right decision that did paid off and I couldn’t be happier with the results I’m getting with my new Raptor.

To the OP, there is the wooden camera lws riser/baseplate that I have heard works good, I also found a few similar options on Amazon, one by small rig I think that looks like it could work well. For handles I used a collar with dual rosette on each side to some rosette mount handles and that got me there easily. and though at first I though the Red side handles would suck but I decided to order them last week and give ‘em a try and I actually think their great, plus the added cheese on each side is needed. There’s also a couple side cheese plates floating around there that fit well. Can’t remember if that was kipper tie or who the manufacturer was on that one tho.

I would just order a bunch of parts on Amazon/BnH and see which ones size up best for your application, return the rest.
 
Has anyone found a top handle solution that works with the DSMC3 monitor? That’s the only piece I’m struggling with.
 
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