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Lesson Info

Gear Setup - Setting Up a Manual Flash “Big Boom Stick”

It's time to show you how to set up the biggest of our big boom stick and we'll be doing this with the bolt v b twenty two they are medium size strobes and with this set up here we're gonna get to a a total of close to five hundred watt seconds of manual flash power so it's a really great set up now I'm sure how you're gonna do this we have right here are pro photo or if I speed ring now when it comes to using solutions like the bold or other manual stroke solutions, you know you're gonna have to play around with things and this is kind of the best setup that we've found to get the most out of these flashes and out of the modifier, so we found they work best so far with the provost or if I speed ring now what we're going to do is we have our ben rowe mono pod and this is again what I'd always say I'm going to remind you guys when putting a couple grand worth of gear you know, five hundred dollars worth of lighting here onto a mono pod do not use a cheap mono pod we have our ben romano ...

pod and we have taken off the s forehead and we've just placed this brass spigot on I think we did that earlier too, so we don't need to read demonstrate that so right now, I'm just gonna place the pro photo speed ring right onto this, and then we're just going to tighten down the speed ring so it's sufficiently tight. Now, this is again just a reminder when you put that spigot on, be sure to use a wrench to tighten it, because once you start putting heavier modifiers like the pro photo speed ring, if that's loose, it can have a tendency to spin and kind of turn while you're using it, which is dangerous, and it can also fall off and, you know, breaking all your lights, okay, so on this guy, what you'll notice that we have this little kind of thumb screw right here that allows us to basically push in and out this bracket, and this is what makes this bracket so perfect for the bolt is number one. We have a large amount of like this pork is fairly large, we can actually fit two of them into it. Number two, we actually have this movable bracket that allows us to place the bolt flashes in there, so we don't have any light spilling out the back. So we need to do one thing that before we go there, so what we need to do is actually take off this little. T portion of the bracket which comes with the or if I speed ring because we don't really need it, so all we're going to do is just undo this and remember almost every you know piece of gear comes with industry standard quarter twenty screws on it okay, so we're going to do is take that off we're going to take this guy off his well, this is just another flash bracket right here and we don't actually need this flash bracket so we don't need this guy we're going to take this one just often out and now with these two screws out, we can take this little t bracket off okay? So now we take that bracket off, we don't need that guy now look at the bottom of the bowl right here and I'm not sure when the bottom knew it it was such a while ago when gotham knew that I'm not sure what comes on the bottom if there's an adapter, anything on the bottom just take it off and you'll reveal the quarter twenty bolt right at the bottom so all we need to do is we have quarter twenty bolts right here we have a quarter twenty female right here we just place the quarter twenty males in two our little bracket and we place the strobe right there and then we're going to start to titan okay, so there we go get it all lined up let me actually set one of these guys down let me set this guy down so I'm not dropping stuff I'm gonna go ahead and grab that and I'm gonna do it right handed because yeah logan logan logan I need my screw back okay, let me go ahead and just do this while logan is being the gentleman that he is in getting that screw I think it fell back there somewhere and then meanwhile I'll let you watch this video while we have some random dude just walking the background actually is not random he's logan okay, you find it thanks, buddy. Okay, so I did was I just mounted this flash by screwing in our quarter twenty male bolt into the court twenty female port on the end of the flat right there and now I'm just going to push this down so we have space to put in our other for bush, okay, now might be just a little bit helpful to tighten that just a little bit. So this doesn't move all around now with the second flash the way the only way that these mount really well is you could possibly place in like this, but it's still kind of difficult what I like to do is mount them so basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna have this guy and let's, just do this. We'll push this guy all the way to the bottom and let's mount our second one, okay? And yes, I'm going to show you in just one second if you want both of the, uh basically these plates to be adjustable, see how we have our all of our buttons and everything you can leave space there if you'd like to so you can leave space that you can make manual adjustments to flash power and so forth, or you could flip one of the month upside down, I find it easier just to leave space between them on dh then, you know, tryingto adjust them up and down, but what we need to first is we need to push the bracket just a little bit in so that we get the flash heads all the way in, and this is exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to other units with other setups, we don't end up getting these bare bulb, you know, this is a bearable strobe system. We have these kind of protruding bulbs like this when we don't get those all the way in through this port, we end up getting spill that comes out of the outside, we got this way basically, did it set up with the bolt with the westcott rabbit box, we couldn't get into a position where we didn't get spill. And what happens with that spill is that generally flares into the camera, so that becomes a problem. So with this, we can get the heads all the way through the port or through that speed ring entrance. And and now we're not going to get that spill. Okay, we can leave a little bit of space here just so we can have a bit of adjustment space, teo, you know, just power settings and so forth. And that is very much adequate. So just make sure that all your bolter titan at this point, this is by far the most complex set up that we're going to doing. All right. Now, when it comes to mounting the battery, have very ghetto fabulous solution to this watch. This so I'm going to do is lift the subsidies. Khun see, down here we get this guy up a little bit higher. Is that all the way out? There we go. Okay. All right. Can you see this nice, lovely piece of velcro tape? So basically I did was I attached the kind of the hard side the velcro underneath directly to the mono pod and then I just have a piece of velcro around the top and this I just didn't take the plastic off the backside so it's just that same plastic there on the back side so now I know this is not I know there's a billion better ways to do it but I have been using this for like a year now and it's worked fine so I haven't like haven't bothered just like fixing it so I was going to show you my ghetto fab sap like get off that stops okay, so I just pop that little there's just a little like a little belt holder kind of thing right there and then all I do is I just fasten that velcro back to this and it's actually very very secure that thing is not going anywhere okay, so I have my battery now amount of this obviously you can find better ways of mounting your battery pack but whatever touche I'm okay with this I'm okay with ghetto fab setups now we're going to take our cables hoop de doo pithy I'm totally dropping things all over the place, man logan logan, my dear would you be just a kind gentlemen and grab that for me okay? We're going to place this directly into here place that in and you'll notice that which side basically you can get in there you could probably get to it from or you can creep under there, get under my legs like that. Nice. Well, well done, sir. Okay, so here, it's plugged in and I'm going to do is just twist this to the right to tighten that. Okay, so now it's just basically locked in place and then all we're going to do is open up our port right here. We have a bad report right there on that guy and we're gonna pop, isn't it can only go in one direction. So it's not like you can mess this up in the past, you know, batteries used to be able to actually go in usable to flip cables, the wrong direction and that was a nightmare because you'd blow up your flashes. Basically, they just die, right? As soon as you turn them on. That was not fun. Okay, so it's it's nice now that they just made everything go on ly one ways, you can't really mess it up. So same thing on the side. We're just going to pop this in right here, okay? We're going to tighten it want to go up to the top? If you want, you can just wrap the cables around. You know, if you wrap the cables just once around this, it kind of gets rid of some of the slack so I'll do that with the other cable too it's a little bit more okay, that goes up there let's unplug this guy wrapped this guy around so you get a little bit less slack going on okay? And I'm gonna let you guys you know well I'm not mounting a horrifying modifier to this because it's gigantic okay, we're not going to put that on there we'll show you how it's done it's very simple you just have the ifyou've ever put together an octa box it's you know they all work the same way you have your little uh just your little rods that you pop in there and you're good to go, eh? So we have this now set up and now what we need to do is put together our sinking but let's, go ahead, just turn this on right now so I'm going to turn out from the battery pack and right when we turn on you have to hold this down actually for it to go there we go. Okay, so now our flashes power up right there so we could see that that one's on our top one is on this one is set toe one over one power I'm going to reduce this toe one sixteenth and have the bottom one on one sixteenth as well so we get actually good recycled times okay, so that is good to go now what we need to do is actually set up the radio and so for the radio, you know, usually you can put this really anywhere you want, but I'm gonna put this around the top piece right here. Let's. Just unplug this cable for one second while I get this around. Perfect. Okay, willpower this guy on and check this out. So I have my three point five millimeter jack on this side, right? Almost dropped. Logan, you always had to come back to get that again, but no, I caught it. Okay, so here's, our three point five. Now we have two three point five millimeter port right here on the left side of our bowls. The problem is it's right here under the sink category. We also have it also has pieces, by the way, but we don't want to touch pc. Pc thing sucks. The thing is that if I were to use one cable, I would need to pocket wizards, right? And that's again, it gets expensive. Why would you need to pop quiz it if you just need both of them to fire together? You just need one pocket wizard problems. We need a cable that splits, so we have this little adapter cable it's, just a female side, three point, five million cirio cable that goes to two male three point five millimeter cables so we just pop this adapter cable on there and you can get this for, like, ten bucks off amazon. Just look for three point five millimetre female to split three point five millimeter male. Okay, pop that right into here. Pop it right into here and now we can control both. I just blinded myself. That was fantastic. I was like two hundred watts in my face. Okay, so now we control both of these from a single pock wizard. So let's, go ahead. Where on channel one, transmit and receive let's, find our camera right here. And this is not a stand that I want to try and let balance by itself. Do I? Do I? Oh, yeah. Let's do this fast. Do fat don't blow don't breathe, people get that on there. Don't try this at home, folks watch it. Like follow right in his face and everything shatters. Okay, so there we go. So now you can see we have both of these firing look at that pretty level, right? I'm going to stop looking at it because I'm basically can't even see right now I came to see where the cameras are no, I'm pretty much just blind, but that's okay, so now we have up to five hundred watt seconds. Basically, each of these is roughly around two fifty two three six they say that their three sixty who knows what they are, but they're roughly about five pakis troves. And with this set up we have essentially ten pocket strokes with a light with manual triggering. Keep in mind that this is all manual power rights. We have to make all of our adjustments from this guy, but we have up to ten pakistan's or the power we can put whatever modify room on the front of it, and we are now good to go. We have a super powerful life source and this with modification with octa with whatever you have over this is actually enough power now to overpower the sun in midday sun again, you start to play with distances from the model. You can't get thirty feet back and expect to overpower the sun, but at around five to ten, even fifteen feet, you can't expect to get a good amount of power. Good mental light power onto your subject. So from this point, all we do is put our desired horrify modifier on there. You might find it easier actually to a apply or to basically, I would recommend putting on the modifier of your choice before you go and put the flashes and everything else on here. So what I typically do is we put on the modifier that we're going to use, and then we put it onto the the the mono pod. We have everything face down, and then we start mounting everything that way. So if you try and mount everything right now with these on there it's very cumbersome, you have these things jetting out, you can potentially throw a rod right through one of the bulbs, which would be kind of a problem. So do that and then put the model resemble wanted to demonstrate this whole setup. You see how convoluted this is. I'm gonna leave this setup because in the next video, going to show you another big boom stick. But we're going to use a full feature strobe with the profile toby to we're gonna show you how much more simple that's set up actually is. So we're doing this video let's, move on to the next.