Satechi Aluminum Monitor Stand

During CES 2016 there were a good amount of grumblings about some newly announced USB-Type C accessories for Apple's ultra-portable MacBook, that coincidentally features a single-port design. With that in mind, Satechi took off with designing a ton of different accessories that help a person become way more productive while maintaining the aesthetics of individual’s investments.

Now with that out of the way, there are way too many accessories to talk about here in this post. If you’re interested in checking out any of them, feel free to see Satechi’s website: 

Now on to the Satechi aluminum stand. It is a strong monitor/laptop stand that looks fantastic that MSRPs for around $40. It comes in gold silver, and space gray.

Atomos Discounted 4K Recorders

On January 20th, Atomos announced it's 4K under $1K pricing change on it's Atomos Ninja Assassin. In addition to that the Shogun was reduced about $500, now coming in at $1495. The Ninja Assassin is one of my most used tools when creating my content. 

In some cases you can find these crazy deals bundled with extras at no extra cost, so I would recommend you dig around on Amazon a bit before you purchase.

This is an amazing development in making 4K more accessible to the budget aware folks out there that have a camera that can output a 4K signal. In the press release Atomos released, their goal is to accelerate 4K adoption globally. This is good news, pretty soon you'll be able to put your new 4K television to use; at this rate 4K will be in our living rooms sooner than you think.

“We are very proud to offer such cutting edge technology at truly amazing price points. 4K for under 1K will continue to speed up 4K adoption globally”
— CEO and co-founder Jeromy Young
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Sony a7RII Low Light Test

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As I was editing my next YouTube video I was sidetracked by the awesomeness of my Sony a7RII. It being warm enough to head outside; I thought I would hit the streets and do some shooting, dragging my wife along with me. Here's the result:

I hope you enjoyed the above video, I had some fun tinkering with it and it gave me the opportunity to become more familiar with my camera. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for improvement; please feel free to drop me a comment.

I will be hitting NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) in April; 17-20th to be exact. I look forward to brining you all the coverage I can. Fortunately I'm covering the show with some friends of mine and fellow YouTubers: @PremierReviewer, @GeekyNerdDad, and @TechExamined will all be attending the show and helping one another bring y'all some great content. If you're interested in supporting me and this team of awesome content creators, feel free to pick up a t-shirt! All profits from this campaign will go to supporting my NAB trip.

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Video Production - The Gear I Use, Part 1

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Creating video is that can be done with many different gear setups, so I thought I would share the gear I use to do my work. I use these items in nearly every single one of my videos on YouTube and for external work. Don't confuse this video with thinking you need to have this gear to get started; I accumulated this gear over many years of exploring my hobby of videography. If you take anything away from this post, I hope it motivates you to just make stuff with what you have. The equipment will come with time:

With this hobby I'm heading to NAB 2016 and if you'd like to support me as I travel to the National Association of Broadcasters show, feel free to buy a t-shirt. Any and all profits from this campaign will go to supporting that trip, click the button below to get one for yourself.

Affordable Sony a7 Series Camera Cage

After purchasing Sony's new a7RII my bank account was empty and since I invested so much into this new camera system I needed to protect it. I also needed a field monitor, but that's another story if and when I review the a7RII. Using the camera's hot shoe to hold heavy monitors isn't desirable so I needed a solution fast and that solution needed to be affordable. So I turned to my plethora of universal gear and started building. Here's what I did:

When this task was all said and done, some folks were asking what the cage system looked like with a monitor on it. It works well with Aputure's VS series field monitors, but I use it with an Atomos Ninja Assassin, as pictured below:

A photo posted by Tomas (@tomas_villegas) on

Feel free to leave me some improvement ideas on this setup, I'm always looking to make this rig more awesome!