Really Right Stuff Bracket Review and “The” Cable Trick

“The” Cable Trick

As a follow up to our oldie but goodie post Pimp your WFT-E1A we have come up with another ingenious use of the Really Right Stuff bracket for our Canon 1Ds Mark II. The Really Right Stuff bracket works great for holding our transmitter and allowing the use of a tripod at the same time, however we still had some problems with shooting tethered and staying connected. For awhile we just looped our firewire cable around and tucked it behind the bracket. This worked OK, but it wasn’t great. For one, even with the extra rigid plastic cable holder, having a two inch straight cable coming out the side of your camera is a bad idea. Tucking the cable made it more secure for when photographers got the cable stuck on something, but it could still get crushed if the photographer put the camera down wrong. The real breakthrough was finding a right hand firewire cable.

This cable, as shown, is angled to place the cable to the front of the camera and not directly out the side. Thus we can then flip the cable back beneath the bracket, and have it not only secure from being pulled out, but also from being crushed. We also ended up with using a 24″ pigtail version of this cable coupled with two 15′ repeater firewire cables. So if the photographer truly gets stuck on something, the pigtail will let go and not damage the camera, but for casual on set movements it won’t fall out. It should be noted, you still need to use the plastic gubbin that Canon gives you to hold the cable into the side of the camera, but once the cable is situated and tucked, it isn’t coming out of there until you tell it to. If you don’t have the gubbin, or need more, call your local Canon rep and ask for a handfull.

The small things in life are the best

If you want to get the right angle firewire cables, they are here at Firewire Depot and the Really Right Stuff bracket we use can be found here Canon Brackets. The bracket we use is called the B57L. Not cheap, but essential to making your life easier when shooting Canon. I would also be extremely surprised if you ever managed to break one of these brackets. No, seriously, maybe using it as a self defense tool (not still on your camera of course) would even come close to marring the finish on it.

Add to:
| Digg it | +Google | Slashdot

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.