Our Travel Vlogging Gear: Cameras, Microphone, Gimbal, & more!

Ready, set, go! Highly recommend getting or renting a GoPro for Disney. So today's video is going to be a bit different than normal which I guess is kind of our theme of this entire quarantine. It turns out it's kind of hard to make travel videos when you're stuck in one place but we've loved having your suggestions for videos and we've tried to make as many of those videos as we can. So one of the more popular suggestions has been to show our travel vlogging gear and while our gear isn't the fanciest and we hope to upgrade some items in the future it has worked really well for us for the last one and a half years which we didn't realize we've been vlogging that long. So today's vlog we're going to show you guys a look at all of our products that we use and give you kind of a behind the scenes glimpse of how we use all those products to make our travel videos. So first up we have our backpack. This backpack is made by a model. We love this backpack. Super awesome. We highly highly recommend it. Opens up from the back when you do that. We've got tons of space here and we added this camera cube here and it comes with like a little divider. Has enough room for our cameras, an extra lens, and then there's also this zipper part where we keep our GoPro, a bunch of our chargers and other things, and a hard drive. So in the back flap or hatch you have room for two laptops to go in here. Another awesome great feature which is an important safety feature is this slot here. This is where we keep all of our important documents like passports and checkbook things like that. And then one of the most prominent features of this backpack is this roll top. You have this little hook here that helps cinch it down so it just rolls up. You can fit tons of stuff in this backpack. The backpack could technically be this tall. Yeah just roll it right here and then I guess go that way. But this thing's awesome because like if you don't need it so big you can just roll it down and tighten it down and it can be nice and compact or you can jam it full of stuff. Over here we have our tripod and then over here something we've added not too long ago is this Peak Design camera clip. Catherine can just slide on her camera and it's a quick release so you just push this button and it slides right out. I love this because I can hike hands-free. I don't have a camera like smacking me in the chest the whole time so it's really really nice. Highly recommend it. So we can't keep all of our stuff in here like for instance our drone stuff. It's two pieces so there's the drone and then there's like a bigger box with all the batteries and all that and we can't quite fit it in here so we just throw it in my backpack which is an old Patagonia backpack. This is our main vlogging camera. It's a Sony a6500 and we've had this little guy the entire time our vlog has been in existence. When we started our vlog it was really overwhelming to look at all the camera options and figure out what was the right choice for us but a lot of the vloggers that we were watching were using this camera at the time so we thought well if we like their videos and it's good enough for them then let's just get it. So we really like this camera because it's a 4k so it shoots in really high quality but another reason why we like it is that it's mirrorless. So if you look at my Nikon D750 which is our DSLR camera compared to this mirrorless guy. I don't know if the GoPro is really capturing the size difference but this thing is heavy and bulky and this thing is so much smaller and lighter. So this Nikon D750 has been my go-to camera for many many years for photos and I love the quality of photos it takes. It's a full frame camera so it's just a really nice camera. This is not full frame. This is like a crop sensor camera so the quality is not as good as a full frame but this thing is just so bulky that I've actually started using the Sony more for photos just because it's easier just to carry around this little guy. So eventually we hope to upgrade this camera to one of the mirrorless full frame Sonys that we can use for both vlogging and photos but we gotta save our pennies first. So you may have noticed this fuzzy furball on the top of our camera. This is a Rode Video Micro. I think it's what it's called. It has a bunch of names but we love this microphone. We have a microphone because it helps with just picking up the sound obviously and it just really covers up the wind really well with this fuzzy stuff. The best part about it though is when we're filming and there's a dog around it is an ultimate dog magnet. Dogs love this thing. They think it's like a stuffed animal I guess. Be warned though. Make sure this thing sometimes it can slide out a little bit and if it's out it's obviously not gonna work. This happened to us when we were on the big island for a clip and it was really tragic when we went to edit the video at the end of the day and there was no sound on one of our clips. It was a big fail. We have two lenses for our Sony a6500. We have a 10 to 18 millimeter lens which is the lens that's on the camera right now as I'm talking and we we got this lens because we wanted to have a more zoomed out lens for when we're doing all of our selfie talking shots. That way our face isn't too close to the screen but before we had the 10 to 18 millimeter lens we had this 18 to 105 millimeter lens. This is the lens we bought when we got the camera and it's really it's a really great lens but at 18 millimeters our like selfie shots tend to be a little bit too close to our face so if you've seen our first six months of vlogs we're our faces are definitely a lot closer to the screen than they are now. So now we use this lens mostly for just really cool zoomed in b-roll shots. If we see something from far away we can kind of sometimes try to get a closer look at it. So we wanted to show you guys kind of how this works. So we're going to put this lens on the camera now and then zoom in on a few things and show you the difference that this guy makes. So right now I'm filming with the 10 to 18 millimeter lens. This is the 10 millimeters. That's the 18 millimeters and now we're on the 18 to 105 millimeter lens. So this is 18. This is 25 or 26. This is 30, 50, 105. Adam you look so good all zoomed in. Believe it. Our next big piece of our vlogging setup is the Zhiyun crane. This is our gimbal or stabilizer and this thing keeps all of our shots nice and steady so we can get those smooth crisp shots and we also use it for a lot of our talking parts so it's our selfie stick. So when you first get it you've got to kind of balance out all these different little knobs and things. You've got to set them in the right spot for the correct weight of the camera and so we found our nice spot that we balance it at and we just always leave it there most of the time unless we want really steady shots with the big zoomed in lens. Then we just adjust one one of the uh we just adjust this bottom one we just slide it back a little bit and it because the lens is so much longer but so for this one it's a little wobbly right now yeah it's wobbly and it'll do whatever because it's off um but you've got to get it to where it's sitting nice and balanced like that just hands-free if it's leaning too much or this way it's not gonna it'll might work but it's not it's gonna work the battery the motors too much so got this button here hold the button to turn it on and it'll come to life okay and so we can move it around like this okay up and down and if you turn it it turns with you it's pretty cool then you've got this other mode here where you push that and it'll stay locked on so you can like turn the thing and it'll stay locked on so that's that's another different little technique so one thing that makes it a little difficult is that it's it's pretty heavy it was even worse when we had this big lens on there but i've got a really strong shoulder now my left shoulder's bigger than my right now because i'm always holding it with my left but this is the one this is what it looks like it also sometimes has a mind of its own yeah if you're like trying to go too much or like one way or another way it'll it'll pop back up or like if i'm trying to zoom way up it'll reach the end and sometimes it'll just like zoom back down so we get kind of frustrated with it so sometimes we just shoot by hand even though the shots aren't nearly as good as with the gimbal yeah so now we're going to show you guys what our shots would look like with the gimbal and without the gimbal so we're going to go for a little jog and first up we're going to use the gimbal ready yep set go okay now we're going to do a sans gimbal and i'm going to try to hold it as steady as i can i'm not purposely going to shake it around so let's see the difference all right ready yeah set go so as you can see from the two clips the one without the gimbal of us running is definitely a bit more shaky it's not horrible but we just like using the gimbal because all of our shots especially our b-roll are uh they're just more smooth and not as jerky we have two different tripods that we use we have this joby gorilla pod and then we have this amazon basics tripod so we use this gorilla pod it's well one it's really fun because you can bend all the legs and like wrap it around stuff so we'll use it if we need to you know wrap the camera around a tree or something that's kind of rare but it's more it just moves more easily and you can kind of adapt it to whatever situation you're in so we'll use it for kind of low shots we'll use it if we can set it up on something and make it taller we'll also sometimes use it instead of the gimbal and kind of hold it out like this um since it bends and stuff it's pretty easy to get the camera on here you just kind of screw it on so it's good for really quick situations when we need a tripod and then this amazon basics tripod is your standard kind of regular tripod we use this more if we want to actually be at eye level to the camera talking to the camera if we want higher up shots when we're walking or just something when this guy's just a little too short but this thing goes to a i think about 60 inches tall to be honest we don't really love this tripod i think it maybe cost us 30 it's really really cheap and it's actually our second amazon basics tripod we had our first one broke a couple months ago but it had lasted us for a really long time it was actually pretty solid but this one just seems like it's way worse quality for some reason it's just not that great so amazon i'll probably be contacting you later today asking for a refund but we'd love to get a more expensive tripod we just keep putting it off so i think now it's time for us to upgrade so it's really good for beginners but if you really want something sturdy i probably wouldn't recommend it but besides videos we also use this thing to get most of the photos of the two of us so a lot of people have asked in the past like how do you guys get photos of the two of you together and it's something that we've prioritized a lot over the last couple years and what we do is we just set up this tripod in public and we snap our own photos so it's kind of awkward uh setting up your tripod in front of people to get a photo of the two of you together but we found that we sometimes will ask strangers to take a photo of us and then like one of us is blurry or it's like a really weird angle and then it's extra awkward you have to wait till they leave and ask someone else to get a different photo of you so we decided after all of the struggles of trying to get strangers to take photos of us we would just use the tripod instead so sometimes it's really nice when there's no one around no one to ask but even if there are people we tend to just whip this thing up and just suck up the awkwardness and just get it done as fast as we can this is my favorite part of it you get to go fishing with it maybe that's why it's not working well and now for my absolute favorite part of all of our gear this is our mavic air drone we went back and forth on getting one for a long time we've wanted it for a long time and we weren't sure whether we wanted to get it because one it's kind of expensive and two there's like tons of laws and regulations and we didn't know if we'd be able to fly it in places like you can't do it in national parks some state parks all that kind of stuff so it's hard to keep up and we just didn't know if we would get our money's worth but we for sure have because we love this thing it just adds another perspective to our vlogs it can be a lot of work to have the drone all the cameras two lenses it makes us like when we're filming it takes so much longer to do stuff when we're switching back and forth but it just like i said it adds another perspective it adds angles you get the zoomed out shot from above you can see the city that we're in and then you see us talking in the city just tells an overall better story throughout the vlog so it's worth it for sure we know that not everyone loves drones especially if you're laying out at the beach trying to relax and there's like this buzzing right above your head so we try to always be very considerate when we fly the drone we typically fly at sunrise so no one's really out the lighting's great too or if it's middle of the day we'll just try to make sure we're away from people when we're flying the drone so that way we're not annoying anyone we also follow all local rules laws regulations for the drone we have this app called air map it's so awesome we highly recommend it if you have a drone you can look at the map see if it's safe to fly the drone there or not tells you kind of why if you can if you're too close to an airport or something but one cool thing about the app is sometimes you're in kind of like an orange area where you have to get special approval to fly and through the app you can get approval within minutes we've never had an issue getting approval just fill out a quick form sometimes there's special rules like you can't fly a certain height or something like that but then you can actually fly in an area that maybe you didn't think you could the newest addition to our vlogging arsenal is the gopro hero 8 black and similar to the drone we got this so we could film different perspectives so adam could be filming on the sony i could be filming on the gopro we could be showing the exact same moment in time but with two different cameras and perspective so we just think it makes things a little bit more interesting at least we hope so but it's also really good for situations when we can't use the sony so if we're out in water or if we're on rides at disney highly recommend getting or renting a gopro for disney it was so much fun to watch all of our reactions on all of the rides it's obviously a lot smaller easier to use way less awkward to use in public than our sony but the sound quality and even the video quality is not as great as our sony so we kind of try to limit it to the situations where we have to use it and we only really have one accessory for it's this floating hand grip and the reason we got this is so when we were on rides at disney you can kind of like cinch this to your wrist so it like there's no way you're going to lose it even if you let go and then the nice thing about this is it floats so if we go snorkeling or do something out in water and we do drop it it'll just float on back up to us a couple final boring yet necessary items are we have hard drives sd cards and batteries so we have four small hard drives and two larger ones a few of these i'm not sure how many we have and then we have six batteries and when we're out filming all day long sometimes we can go through all six especially if it's really hot or really cold they burn through faster for whatever reason some days when we're filming sunrise to sunset we'll go through more than one of these in the day so it's good to have a backup and then whenever we get back from vlogging katherine always uploads our footage directly to a hard drive and then to a second hard drive for extra security one time we lost all the footage on a hard drive and it was going to be really expensive to get it back and it was just heartbreaking it sucked it was the worst so for the software for our vlogging process we use a handful of different tools the first is premiere pro which is what we use to edit all of our videos it's a very beefy tool and we know like this much of it there's so much to learn and i've spent a lot of time trying to watch tutorials but it's pretty complex stuff so we know enough to get by right now but we hope to learn more in the future i'm currently the one who edits all of the vlogs that you guys see on our main youtube channel however adam has edited some of our patron only vlogs we've created a handful of those just for our patreon subscribers so if you want to go check those out go check out our patreon page we've done a couple fun little videos for them on there and it's been fun to see adam do editing too and then for all of our photos we use lightroom to edit and then to make all of our thumbnails for youtube we use adobe illustrator we have like the adobe creative suites we have a bunch of different adobe software so we can use and for the music for our vlogs we're using a tool called music bed but for the first year of vlogging we actually used a different tool called epidemic sound but then we found out about music bed and like the vibe of the music just kind of fit us better and we like the user interface better so we decided to make the switch over and if you guys want to try out music bed for yourself we will have a link below to get you a free month to check it out we hope you guys enjoyed a glimpse at all the gear we use to make our vlogs happen so our goal with our vlogs is to make them fun and informative but we're also working really hard to make the video quality better from the shots we get the music we use to us just feeling like less awkward and more comfortable just talking on camera so we'll put a link to all the products we talked about in the description below so you can check them out for yourself if you guys have any questions about the gear we use just drop it in a comment below we'll make sure to answer or if you guys have any suggestions of gear that we should start saving up our money for let us know in the comments as well it's very dewy this morning here's a behind the scenes look our feet get soaked these are like light gray now they're dark gray so sometimes we put ourselves in weird situations like getting our feet soaked just to get the best lighting or have the best backdrop so yeah the true life of a vlogger some boats bumping some tunes the gear we use to make our vlogs happen i don't know why that was so funny that was so bad