Prepped my first Komodo today, at AbelCine. The build came together nicely, though it’s frustrating not to have anywhere to mount aks besides the top handle. The handle is so tiny as is that any mounting to it makes it basically useless. I ended up with the Teradek armed off of the back mounting point on the battery plate, using a mini Noga, and the MDR in a gold mount cradle at the back.
This is absolutely not the camera for a Preston, unfortunately. Even the MDR4 would be about the same size as the camera body, and the MDR3 is just ridiculous. Production couldn’t afford the WCU rental on this one, so we stuck with my Preston…and here we are.
Besides mounting issues, the only real issue that arose during prep was that two of our four lenses didn’t match the other two – the 32 and 50 were much cooler than the 25 and 75 (these were TLS s2 Panchros). Luckily, Abel had duplicates of the same series in stock, so we were able to mix and match sets to find a better-matching set.
One other consideration for the build was the mounting of the spider grips. I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to lose the 15mm riser for handheld mode, so using those rods/rosettes was a no-go. I tried to get bolt-on rosettes off the top of the cage, but Abel was all out. I ended up with the spider grips on the top rods, and there’s just barely enough room for the motor and top handle up there, but it all fits. Hopefully getting to the touchscreen isn’t too much of a problem tomorrow. I have an iPhone loaded up with Red Control just in case, though I’m not hopeful about its performance. We’ll see.
