Buyers Guides

Find out everything you need to know about our products before you buy

Simplify your purchasing process

Buying new equipment can be a daunting experience, especially for those who are new to the world of professional video.

What's the difference between an ENG camera and a Studio camera? Does your scene need hard or soft lights? And what sort of hardware does my software for the best performance?

To try and take some of the mystery out of choosing the right equipment for your next purchase we've put together a series of buyers guides. These are shot informative articles that give you some information on each of the products we stock, their purposes and how they can fit into your workflow.

CCU & remote control buyers

Camera Control Units and remote controllers are common across many workflows. Whether it be a simple start/stop function for recording are an advanced colour shading and racks engineer control panel, these devices can give you greater control and save you time.

Converters buyers guide

Converters are possibly the most straightforward device we can have in our signal chain. They do exactly as the say on the box by converting from one standard to another.

Mixers & switchers buyers guide

A vision mixer or switcher allows you to take video outputs from multiple devices and switch or “mix” between them. Every live show you’ve ever watched that has cut between different cameras has used one of these devices.

Cables & accessories Buyers Guide

Though not the most glamorous of products cabling is still a large part of any video production. Wireless video solutions can be used in places however you’re than likely going to need a few runs of cable at some point!

Workstation Buyers Guide

In this guide we will take you through each component within a system, what it's purpose is and how it can affect performance.

Camera Buyers Guide

There are many different types of cameras and finding the one that suits your needs is critical to producing the content you want. This guide covers all the different types of cameras we sell.

Camera Accessories Buyers Guide

There's lots of camera acccessorues available and understanding what they do and how they fit into your workflow can be confusing. This guide is aimed at giving you an overview of the most common accessories and what they do.

Streaming & Encoding Buyers Guide

Online content is becoming more prevalent, but streaming can be quite a difficult topic to get stuck into. This buyers guide is aimed at demystifying the world of streaming products.

Recording Buyers Guide

Recording is the most fundamental part in any video production, if what we were shooting wasn’t recorded then what would be the point!

Lighting and Chromakey Buyers Guide

Light is the basis of our vision and a such is an important part of any production. The human eye is capable of perceiving roughly 20 stops of dynamic range allowing us to notice details in shadows whilst outdoors on a sunny day.

Drones Buyers Guide

Drones have made a big impact on the world since their popularisation and the professional video market has been quick to adopt them for a variety of uses.

Lenses Buyers Guide

Next to sensors, lenses are the most critical component of any camera. Lenses take in the light in a scene and focus it onto the sensor so that an image can be recorded. While a majority of consumer cameras come with fixed lenses, professional cameras nearly always have a specific lens mount for detachable lenses.

Keys & Control Surfaces Buyers Guide

For all digital creatives, the goal is to work as intuitively and as effortlessly as possible. The hardware connection between artist and software acts to dovetail the functionality of the software to the senses of touch and vision. That can only be achieved with the combination of ergonomics and intuitive fingertip control of the GUI (Graphic User Interface) tool set.

Colour Management Buyers Guide

In everyday life, colour management isn’t an issue that touches most people. We switch on our tablet, laptop or desktop computers and, thanks to the hard work of colour scientists and engineers, accept that what appears on the screen in front of us is an acceptable representation of the real world.

Camera Media Buyers Guide

When capturing anything in camera we must have something to capture to. Whilst we have a very good guide for storage for computers here, professional cameras tend to use different media to record to and as such it’s important to know more about the storage required.

Test Equipment Buyers Guide

Test equipment can range from outboard scopes to signal generators and in this guide, we will cover what each device does and how it can help you keep on top of your production.

Routers Buyers Guide

When talking about routers in production environments we are simply talking about devices designed to take inputs from different sources and route them to outputs. Routers are nearly always described by how many inputs and outputs they have so it’s very common to see 4x4 all the way up to 288x288 and beyond.