- What's going on, everybody?
I'm out here in Washington DC,
we're doing a project for Boeing.
They make things like planes and jets
and things that go to space,
all kinds of cool stuff.
We do a ton of traveling with our shoots
and we've learnt a whole lot along the way.
I always have nightmares of leaving
the gear behind somewhere,
or the gear not coming out on the carousel,
not being able to do the shoot.
So here's a little video on how to travel with gear.
Now there's three ways to transport your gear, right.
You can carry it on the plane with you,
which I try to do as much as possible,
especially with the cameras and batteries and lenses.
Second option is to check in,
sometimes you're just required to do that.
And third is to ship it,
but then you have to coordinate where it's gonna go
and it takes a little bit longer,
but essentially my go to
is to try to carry it on plane as much as possible.
Most flights, we're allowed to carry on
one personal item, like a backpack
and then we're allowed to have one carry-on item
that you can store in the overhead bin.
So these are Pelican 1510s and these are awesome
because they're hard cases
and they're just the right size to fit on the overhead bins.
Inside here is the camera
and inside here are the lenses.
This is my carry-on, this is Steve's carry-on,
And we both carry-on backpacks with our laptops,
hard drives and little things like that.
Welcome to Dallas Fort Worth Airport,
at three AM in the morning.
We've had some bad weather,
caused some delays in our flights.
Basically trapped here for like six hours.
All our clothes has been checked in,
so Steve smells like-
To be honest, traveling with gear
can get a little bit exhausting.
We've done a lot of flights and each time we fly,
we bring way too much equipment.
- Just in case.
Yeah.
Well that's the problem with gear and travel
is as soon as you say "oh, we don't need this,
"we don't need a matte box, we don't need these filters."
That's exactly what you end up needing.
First thing you might wanna know,
is media rate with airlines.
It's kind of iffy on how to get it.
So you're gonna wanna skip the kiosks,
because you can't get the media rate through the kiosk.
You wanna just go straight to the front desk area
and talk to them.
Tell them that you're part of a media company,
you're traveling for a shoot
and that's why you have all these extra bags.
Whatever airline you're flying with,
go type in that airline name and then "media rate"
and then just look through their policies.
And everyone's different,
a lot of them give you like discounted rates on extra bags,
'cause we always travel with a ton of bags.
And also, most of our bags are overweight,
usually there's a 50 pound limit,
before there's like $100 charge,
but a lot of airlines wave that fee,
so you can actually take a big case and just stuff it.
Today we saved like, what?
250 bucks, because of media rate.
And really, a lot of times,
all you have to do is just say, "This is my business card."
And sometimes they'll say, "we need to see credentials."
And we always ask, "What do you mean,
specifically by credentials?"
and they say, "well some sort of official badge."
The thing is, they don't know
what they're looking for either.
We talked to some of those front desk people,
and they're all confused about it
just as much as we were.
Pretty much a business card alone, with a company name on it
and just anything that shows that it's media.
Once, they were giving us a pretty hard time about it,
they were like, "oh, you can't do it
with just a business card."
And then they brought out a printed copy of their policy.
And then we were like, "It says right there."
So literally even the people that are working here
don't know that much about the media rate.
- The trick is to be confident
in the fact that you are a media professional.
That you are transporting media gear.
- Sometimes they actually even ask for your website,
and if you have a website, that even works sometimes.
The more ways you can prove
that you are part of a production company
or media company, then you're good.
- And one more thing that you can do,
is print yourself out, your own company media passes.
You can get 'em printed on hard plastic.
I think they're about 12 to 15 bucks a piece,
or you can print 'em on paper, get 'em laminated
and just have a clip.
And just have your picture, your company name
and the words, "media pass" on there.
- If it's laminated or hard plastic,
they're gonna pick it up and be like, "whoa, this is legit."
And you could put- copy-paste a random barcode on there,
just so it looks even more authentic.
And then they won't even ask any questions.
But, generally speaking, the people at the front desk
have literally said like, "we don't know exactly
"what we're looking for."
We just find something that looks official.
Now, for those of you shooting on cine lenses
or fully manual lenses,
a good habit you wanna get into
is to fully open up your aperture,
whenever you're gonna store your lens.
The reason is because whenever you close down the aperture,
those blades become exposed
and they're more vulnerable to damage and shock.
So lenses are usually in the safest position,
when those blades are tucked up behind the metal
and wide open.
And that's a good habit to get into all the time,
but especially if you're gonna tug it
all the way across the country.
Okay, now we are in Saint Louis.
Sometimes, when we're traveling with a ton of gear,
we're trying to constantly figure out how to consolidate
the gear into the least amount of cases,
or else it's just gonna be way too overwhelming.
So sometimes what we'll do instead of packing
an entire back for clothes,
we'll take the clothes
and kinda just stick it into our gear bag.
Especially the stuff that you're gonna get checked in.
You have no idea how much that stuff
is gonna be tossed around.
So I always try to take my soft clothing
like shirts, sweaters, pants,
and I try to kinda tuck it into every corner.
Just to add a little bit of that extra cushion.
But you don't really wanna open up a case
in front of all of your clients
and just have a bunch of socks and underwear laying around.
So one of the first things I do after I check into my room,
is always head to the closet and grab a little plastic bag.
One of these bags, there's always one in there.
So now your clothes can kinda just
double as extra padding when you're traveling.
And I'll just throw all my clothes into this little bag.
Oh yeah, I always get these.
They always inspect the bag,
when they see like camera gear,
they're like, "what the hell is this?"
If you don't have good equipment insurance,
you should get some.
Let's say your airline loses your gear,
then your insurance should cover it,
but what's not insured is the footage.
Now, you have to remember
that not only are you using your time,
but everybody's time, you have to add all that up
and you have to realize that you're spending
a ton of money per day of shooting.
So always, always download and backup your footage.
If you could afford a DIT, or Digital Imaging Technician
to kinda download and check your footage along the way,
that's great, but I get that a lot of times
you don't have access to someone like that.
And this is important,
don't just download on one drive,
but make sure you make another copy
onto a secondary drive.
These are Western Digital Passport Hard Drives,
they're not crazy expensive
and I at least have to have it on two of these,
if not more.
And some people like to download it
from a memory card to a hard drive
and then from this hard drive,
they'll copy it over to this hard drive,
I don't recommend doing that.
Always download from the card, straight onto the hard drive
and then again from the card to a different hard drive.
'cause I have had times where the files went corrupt
as you were transferring from the card to the hard drive.
So the issue is, if this file is corrupt on this hard drive,
and you back that up, you're just backing up a corrupt file.
Doesn't do you any good.
So two files downloaded directly from a memory card.
It takes longer, but I cannot tell you
how important this process is.
I shot a project where the person did exactly that,
they downloaded it from the card,
copied it onto a hard drive and it went corrupt.
It was an Alexa mini file
and like half the files from the day just wouldn't play,
it went totally corrupt,
you can't load it into Premiere or anything.
It was a dead file.
And they backed that file up onto another hard drive.
They called me like a month later
and they were like, "please tell me
you have a backup to this file,
because our files took a sh***.
Boom! I got an extra copy.
I keep all the files I shoot.
So you can never have too many backups.
Another thing when you're formatting a new hard drive,
I always just unplug everything else from it,
just so that I don't accidentally format the wrong drive.
Again, it's a pretty small risk,
but every little thing like that
I can do to just lower that risk just by a little bit,
I'll do it because let's say
you're downloading footage and you just had a couple beers,
you could wreck your day.
So now I got solid copies of all my files.
What I'm gonna do is take this one
and get it out of my possession as fast as I can
just throw it at somebody to take it.
But basically what I'm trying to do,
is get rid of it so I'm not the only person
responsible for the footage.
You don't want them to be in the same car,
even if you can avoid it.
- They always inspect this thing.
And sometimes they jack it up.
They yanked on one of these antennas,
trying to tug it up,
'cause they didn't know how to remove the mimic system,
and they ripped one of the antennas out.
So that kinda sucks.
We're off to Florida for two days now
and one of the big things you always wanna keep in mind,
is to always count the number of begs you have,
'cause you're gonna be tired and exhausted.
You're gonna start loosing track of stuff.
So one of the things we always do before taking off
is just counting one,two,three,four,five,
six,seve,eight,nine,10 bags.
So every time we get in the car,
or get out of the car or whatever, we count to ten.
And at least check the essentials of stuff
you can't get replaced.
We like to generally spend the day before we take off
and just set up everything.
We build the camera, we set it up on the Movi.
There's like some pieces that are very, very small,
you might not even think about,
but without that little piece,
a whole piece of gear can become useless.
Like for example the Movi Pro,
like if your forget the base plate for that,
then all of a sudden you have this giant
awesome Movi pro that you can't even put a camera on.
Oh my god my body is broken.
I just did one of those mud runs,
it was like a Spartan race.
So it's where you just like go
and run through a whole bunch of mud,
so you could have this piece of metal.
It was one of the shorter ones.
It was only like four and a half miles or something,
so I was like, "I don't even have to prepare for that."
Wrong move.
I got cramps in every single muscle in my body
and now I am just wrecked.
I totally under estimated that,
but at least I can feel slightly accomplished
or whatever.
An I also tested out the hyper lapse feature
on the GoPro Hero 7,
I just had it on a chest mount
and it turned out pretty cool.
I actually like this effect.
I don't know why, it's the concept of paying money
to just put yourself through misery.
It's such a weird concept.
Carrie was saying it'd be kinda fun
if we swing up for another one
and we tell you guys which race we're doing,
so a bunch of you guys can kinda like join in
and do the mud run with is, I don't know,
would you guys be interested in joining up?
Now before we wrap this up,
let me just leave you off with one tip,
which is with batteries and lithium ion batteries.
Now once you get your airline picked out,
you definitely wanna check with your airline
what the lithium ion carry-on policy is,
because all of them could be slightly different.
But generally speaking, the current FAA regulations-
and again, this could updated,
all spare lithium ion batteries
need to come onto the plane with you
and you cannot check it in.
So make sure you don't leave these spare batteries
in your luggage, or else you might get to your destination,
and be like, "where's all my check luggage?"
and you have to call the airport
and realize that they held all the luggage
at the last place, because there's all
these lithium ion batteries.
So remember to keep all the lithium ion batteries
on you, in your backpack or your carry-on.
Do not check it in.
I'm not 100% sure why they want you to carry it on with you,
I heard some people say that batteries can make sparks
and sometimes start a little fire,
if it's in the cabin, the flight attendance
can put it out, apposed to if it's underneath.
Now generally all these lithium ion batteries have a label
on the battery that tells you how many watt hours are in it.
Under 100 watt hours is generally not an issue,
and then if it's between 100 and 160 watt hours,
then there's a limit to two per person,
so we usually try to travel with four batteries
within that range, so I carry two, Steve carries two.
And a good example of that would be our red batteries,
which are 153 watt hours.
Alright, time to read some comments.
My last video was 10 Christmas gifts
that film-makers will love.
Let's see what you guys had to say.
Everyday Dad says, "You had me at sweater."
I know, this is seriously my favorite article
of clothing right now.
Can't even put it on, I'm so sore,
my body literally doesn't want to move.
Ouch.
"What do you thing about Dji Osmo Pocket?"
Uh, I ordered one, so as soon as I get it,
I'll let you guys know.
"That sweater is lit, because it has LEDs attached to it."
That is very factual.
Hunter says, "Time to sell my organs..."
(laughing) I'm already ahead of you,
I've already sold all the organs I possibly can
and still be alive.
"Did you just give yourself a haircut?"
(laughing) I did.
And my hair's been kinda jacked up ever since,
so please don't look at it.
Becki and Chris says, "Please send me the Apache t shirt
for Christmas.
Thanks in advance."
If you guys don't know who Becki and Chris is,
they have an awesome Youtube channel
and Chris actually gave me a spin around in his helicopter.
So that was sick.
This Boeing project has had us flying all over the place,
to film all kinds of cool stuff, like the Apache,
we have footage of the Apaches.
We filmed F15s, F18s, like really, really cool stuff,
but it's all classified, so I'm not really aloud to show it.
At least until they release it.
I was just over at NASA Kennedy Space Center
a few days ago.
Once they start releasing some of the footage to the public,
I can show you guys and should be pretty cool.
Anyways, I need to lay back down and just
be like a dead corpse for a little bit.
I'll see you guys later.
Bye.