3 Must-Have Video Accessories for the Sony a6500
- How To Shoot Quality Video Footage
- 3 Types of Lights for Video Production
- Shotgun Mic or Lavalier Mic: Which Is Right for You?
Photo by Aman Upadhyay on Unsplash
Your Sony a6500 camera is a great tool for both still photography and video. There are some must-have video accessories for Sony a6500 that can assist you to get the most out of its video capabilities.
Accessories for video fall into several categories, camera handling, lighting, and audio. It’s important to keep in mind that video accessories won’t automatically improve your video, that’s still the work of gaining experience and skill.
What these Sony a6500 video accessories can do for you is make certain jobs either easier to do well or add capability that you can exploit. So we came up with a very short list of 3 must-have video accessories that can benefit your video efforts, specifically tailored to your Sony a6500 mirrorless camera.
Camera Cage
What is a camera cage? It’s a housing, bracket, or grip for your camera that protects it and adds mounting points for all the various accessories for video that we add to our cameras to increase their capabilities and improve handling.
Some of those other must-have video accessories that would overwhelm this small camera without a camera cage are external mics, external monitors, follow focus systems, teleprompters, wireless transmitting gear, follow focus system, and matte boxes.
Attaching one external microphone to your Sony a6500 via the hot shoe pretty much takes up all the room available on the camera itself. A camera cage offers multiple mounting points, none of them attaching directly to the camera.
That’s an important thing to consider, because if we attempt to add more and heavier items to our camera hot shoe, we put extra strain on the camera’s top plate. Any drop or even a slight bump to a show mounted bracket with multiple items on it could damage the camera.
Looking at an example of a cage designed for this camera, such as the TILTA ES-T27 from Ikan, we see all of these considerations factored into its design. Since the Sony a6500 is the same basic body as the other Sony a6xxx series of cameras, it will also fit them.
Machined from a single piece of aluminum for the cradle art of the cage, it provides excellent damage protection for the camera.
Some other features are the multiple very secure mounting points for added gear, an integrated 15mm rail system for lens accessories, quick release for the entire rig, and full access to all buttons, doors, switches, and slots. It even has a cooling system to combat the problem of hot operation during long shoots.
Portable LED Light
Now we move on to the lighting category of our must-have video accessories for Sony a6500. Compared to photographic lighting, cinematography lighting can seem confusing at the start. But it isn’t difficult to figure out.
Many of the same lighting configurations we use for portraits and product photography can be adapted directly to video. The biggest change that we need to adapt to ourselves is movement. Videos move, with camera movement and subject movement, sometimes both at once. Even if we’re simply panning across the scene with a fluid head, that’s still movement.
Which is why having a light mounted to the camera cage is often a good practice. We can use the camera mounted light as a catch light or as the primary light source. Since we want it on camera, battery powered LED lights are a great fit.
The iLED144 Bi-Color Flood Light from Ikan is a good example of the type of portable light that can be used this way. Not only is it small and lightweight, it also has adjustments for color temperature and power level so we can seamlessly blend it in with the ambient light or the rest of our lighting rig.
LED lights are good for both video and for still photography. Continuous light is provided, the LED bulbs are cool and very efficient, and the quality of the light is very high.
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Shotgun Microphone
Filling the audio portion of our must-have video accessories for Sony a6500 is a shotgun mic. There are other types of microphones such as wireless lavaliers and boom mics we can use for improving the audio portion of our videos, but a high quality shotgun mic mounted to the camera is a very versatile tool for many styles of videography.
One model that will work very well with your Sony a6500 camera is the Comica CVM-CP2 super cardioid condenser shotgun mic. It also comes from Ikan, designer, maker, and retailer of high end accessories for video. Ikan designers are videographers themselves, so the gear is well thought out. Being their own manufacturer, they can offer their high end gear for lower prices than many other brands.
What makes the Comica shotgun mic so useful is that it can be powered by its own battery or by phantom power, has built-in low noise circuitry, and has a frequency range of 20Hz to 20KHz and a signal-to-noise ratio of greater than 65dB. It can mount to most cameras and fits on any camera cage. It can even be used as a boom mic with an extension pole.
Helpful Hints and Instruction
Another category of must-have video accessories is quality instruction. The new cameras are incredibly capable which means we really should try to get the best out of them.
Keep coming back to PhotographyTalk.com for helpful hints, equipment reviews, and in-depth instruction for various techniques for all skill levels from beginner to advanced.
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