Ideas for an initial camera for "roadtrip" documentary videos

[eatstoomuchjam]

5 minutes ago, kayasaman said:

Right now I just wish there was somewhere I could go and rig up my current equipment on my car, including drone and practice and see what kind of things I can achieve.... 

This is actually on the right track.  Before I bought my Wrangler and kitted it out, I took the car that I had (Subaru Outback) and took the sort of road trip that I wanted for 6 weeks, and I made things as inconvenient for myself as I could.  I brought a ground tent, but stayed in the back of the car most nights which meant shifting stuff around for 5-10 minutes.

It was a great way to figure out what stuff I actually used vs what I didn't use and at the end of 6 weeks, if I didn't use something and resented moving it around every day to sleep, that thing was stored and never brought on a road trip again.  The Subaru could go most of the places that I wanted, but not all.  So I chose one of the few vehicles more capable (Wrangler) and built out my platform system/power to match my preferences and needs.

What I have works perfectly for me and every time I'm out camping, I feel like I'm living the dream.  Except, you know, when I spend half a day jerryrigging a 125 pound rooftop tent back onto my car after the roof rack almost dropped it on the ground.  But for a lot of people, spending 2-3 months in my setup would be absolutely miserable.

Have you considered doing a smaller and less ambitious trip with what you have in order to shake out your needs/wants?

[kayasaman]

11 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

For the vehicle, a Landy is a great option.  venture4wd has one as his secondary vehicle and a lot of his content lately has been driving it all over the mountains in Arizona.

For a trailer to take off-road, you should think about that long and hard before making the jump.  I'd rank buying a pull-behind camper as one of the worst decisions I've made in my entire life.  The one I got was not specifically an overlanding camper or whatever, but it had decent enough ground clearance - but even as a fairly short trailer (about 15 feet), it plus the tongue basically doubled the length of my car (my Wrangler is about 19 feet long) which is awful when you're on a small dirt road that someone gated off.
And that's note even starting to get into how often it broke, the difficulty of repairs, etc.  I ended up selling it at a huge loss (bought for $10k, put in about $2-3k in upgrades, sold for about $3-4k) and felt grateful to be rid of the fucking thing.

YMMV, of course.

Given your plans, you may also want to check out Dan Grec's page/channel.  He hit every country in Africa in a Wrangler with Ursa Minor camper shell, a setup similar to venture4wd's beloved Orangie.  He also has a lot of thoughts about what is and isn't important.

What sort of NAS do you have in mind?  Keep in mind that bouncing around on rough roads will have a negative impact on spinning hard drives, even if they're turned off/parked.  My solution for longer-term trips is a handful of 4T SSD's and just copy everything to two of them and keep them in different parts of the car (and/or trailer if you have one).  I also have some OWC thing that takes two 2.5" SATA SSD's and does hardware RAID-1 - so I use that with 2 4T drives in it.

This depends a lot on the rooftop tent and your goals.  My hardshell RTT (iKamper Skycamp Mini) sets up and comes down in around 2 minutes and I can leave a pillow and some blankets inside it.  That's faster than any ground tent I've used (I've used Coleman pop-ups which set up in about 5 minutes and come down in, realistically, about 10 if you actually pack it back into a bag properly - the bags suck).  It also facilitates camping on a pullout in a dirt road where a tent isn't feasible.  If you're moving around a lot, it's great.  If you're going somewhere for a week at a time and staying there, the extra few minutes in setup/teardown is a lot less annoying.

I'm actually going to sell mine this Spring, but not because I don't like the tent itself - but because despite having a heavy-duty Rhino Rack roof rack, after tens of thousands of miles with the tent on the car, the roof rack started falling apart.  Two years ago, my camping trip was cut short by it nearly falling off the car (roof rack loosened) and last year, I ended up immediately taking it back off the car (and injuring my arm in the process) because the now-repaired roof rack re-broke, this time requiring a replacement part that Rhino took something like 4 months to ship to me (despite that the rack is still a current product that they are selling).

Now I'm revising my platforms in the car so that I can sleep inside.

Again, it depends on the use case and where you are!  For me, if I'm staying in an established campground, I can use their toilets.  If I'm off-grid, I have a Cleanwaste Go, a sturdy folding plastic toilet that can be used either to poop into a hole in the ground or into a little plastic baggie full of what is basically kitty litter.
It ain't glamorous, but it works.

But if I were trying to camp out in an event center parking lot for a week, my setup sucks.  I'd just get a hotel room at that point. 😃

Ok these guys were a total team:

 

 

with 3x vehicles that had all the bells and whistles...

 

In some of their other videos the kids of the main guy usually just slept in the back of the SUV... I think it was either a 4Runner Gen5. , a Sequoia, or LandCruiser?

 

What I do like is that they also were using the Canon C70 (I think?) and the DJI Inspire 2 drone. They also had the Garmin Tread Overland XL for navigation, a RedArc system to control the rigs, and Icom 2-way radios for communication. There was even a thermal scope for nightvision - those things are cool as some can even record video and even at 4k!!

 

As far as NAS, I will check out SuperMicro - which coming from a server and network engineering background anyway, I would be installing FreeBSD on it and then using ZFS across the drives.

I'd probably be looking at SATA SSD's or possibly NVME type stick HD storage if they have made one?

 

Looks like I'm in luck!! https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/nvme

 

Coupled to a 10GbE switch and it's a formidable setup.

 

for trailer I was actually checking out the ROA videos for various models and it seems currently Pause is one of the best you can find: 

 

sadly the 4Runner that I fell in love with only has a 6000lbs tow rating so these fall above that!

 

But something like this would definitely work: 

 

 

plus loads of storage space to store the camera equipment.... I really like the dinette area as it has space for 2 which in my mind means 2x laptops 🙂

 

Of course these are just current thoughts for the moment.

 

Something that Jim Baired (adventurer from Canada) normally does (he's got a teardrop) is mount the action camera on the top of the trailer to give a view of the road plus the truck towing it. It's a nice perspective and it works.... though I was thinking about doing that directly on the 4Runner Trailhunter which has the ARB roof rack on top.

[kayasaman]

22 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

This is actually on the right track.  Before I bought my Wrangler and kitted it out, I took the car that I had (Subaru Outback) and took the sort of road trip that I wanted for 6 weeks, and I made things as inconvenient for myself as I could.  I brought a ground tent, but stayed in the back of the car most nights which meant shifting stuff around for 5-10 minutes.

It was a great way to figure out what stuff I actually used vs what I didn't use and at the end of 6 weeks, if I didn't use something and resented moving it around every day to sleep, that thing was stored and never brought on a road trip again.  The Subaru could go most of the places that I wanted, but not all.  So I chose one of the few vehicles more capable (Wrangler) and built out my platform system/power to match my preferences and needs.

What I have works perfectly for me and every time I'm out camping, I feel like I'm living the dream.  Except, you know, when I spend half a day jerryrigging a 125 pound rooftop tent back onto my car after the roof rack almost dropped it on the ground.  But for a lot of people, spending 2-3 months in my setup would be absolutely miserable.

Have you considered doing a smaller and less ambitious trip with what you have in order to shake out your needs/wants?

Obviously right now I'm talking about the "ultimate goal"....  during my trip up to Scotland I had a blast filming but everything was first time use so rushed and I got a few things wrong!!

 

I even got to drive a LandRover Defender 110 here (at about ~4 mins in) which was my first *real* 4x4 experience: 

 

At about ~3 mins in, I used the DJI Action 4 to film inside and through the window. I had the camera set to ISO 100 which was a big mistake!! It caused a heck of a lot of unnecessary noise when if I had, had the thing set to Auto ISO, it would have exposed correctly for me rather then me trying to fight it. Difference in technique basically between stills landscape photography set to M or Manual mode. It worked much better for part 3 after some experience....

 

Lots of learning post videos of how I could have made things better but lighting conditions were challenging to say the least and I think even with Auto ISO the DJI's struggled.... basically small sensor and noise in shadows syndrome!

 

Other then that my 4-door managed most places, even straddling the track with high central rise (like a monorail), it still managed LOL - though that was by putting the wheels onto the center and the side (not bad for something with stiffened and lowered "sports" suspension - as is claimed from the standard Spec sheet):

[eatstoomuchjam]

33 minutes ago, kayasaman said:

As far as NAS, I will check out SuperMicro - which coming from a server and network engineering background anyway, I would be installing FreeBSD on it and then using ZFS across the drives.

I'd probably be looking at SATA SSD's or possibly NVME type stick HD storage if they have made one?

 

Looks like I'm in luck!! https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/nvme

Are you serious?  A 2U server in a camper?  That's going to be awfully noisy and expect to drain your batteries in about an hour.

If you'd be insistent on a NAS, a 2nd gen Flashstor 12 is probably a better option.  You could probably also power it by DC from your battery pack which is more efficient.
https://www.asustor.com/en-gb/product?p_id=91

Just keep in mind that portable drives will use less power and in many cases, be faster than a 10gE NAS.

39 minutes ago, kayasaman said:

sadly the 4Runner that I fell in love with only has a 6000lbs tow rating so these fall above that!

IMO, you need to think about your goals.  You're talking about an overlanding rig capable of going anywhere, but then you're talking about a huge 6,000+ pound camper that looks to be about 25 feet long that you'd be towing behind a 16-foot 4Runner.  Those are not compatible configurations.  Even in the video that you linked, the trailers that they were using were much smaller overlanding setups that are about 8-10 feet long.

If your main goal is to get a setup that you can take all over the world and drive into crazy places, my suggestions are:

- Total length of vehicle + trailer is less than 30 feet, better if less than 25, ideally less than 20 (i.e. no trailer at all)
- Choose a vehicle that is available in a lot of places.  If you break down in another country and you're in a car that is available in that country, you have a good chance of finding suitable replacement parts.  If you're in a car that isn't sold in that country, you could be choosing between a long wait for parts (but maybe you'll make new friends in whatever town you're in!) and jerryrigging a solution that will probably break down again
- Similarly, choose a fuel option based on what will be easily available where you're going.  Is gasoline as available in every country as diesel?  By now, probably yes, but you should confirm that.
- Unless you have shore power available every night or plan to run a gasoline generator, you will have a power budget that is determined by how many solar panels you can realistically fit on your vehicle (and potentially some folding ones that you deploy when stationary).  Your solar panels and batteries will be DC devices.  When possible, choose DC powered options over AC powered (~10% efficiency gain/loss) and avoid things that are power hungry.  A Windows gaming laptop with a dedicated GPU can be great for editing footage, but if it's pulling 150W of power while you're editing, you'll drain your battery pretty fast, especially if you're also running Starlink (120W continuous draw for mine with the v2 dishy, the new smaller dishy might be a bit less, and a little less yet if you do DC conversion).
- Conversion to sleeper mode should take only a few minutes and ideally, only a few steps.  A daily 20 minute setup/teardown gets old fast
- Pay attention to weight distribution, you want the heavy stuff on the bottom of the car, as much as possible - that'd be batteries, water, etc.

MrSMW's suggestion of a non-overlanding RV and a dirtbike is a really good one, btw, for many places that one might want to go.  It might limit you a bit in very remote areas, but there's a lot to be said for staying on fairly maintained roads until you don't have to.  You could even split the difference with a 4WD sprinter (I think these can also be lifted a little bit?) which will get you even more places - and a dirtbike can get you that extra little bit.

[MrSMW]

1 hour ago, kayasaman said:

sadly the 4Runner that I fell in love with only has a 6000lbs tow rating so these fall above that!

How much budget are we talking here because it’s looking like 100k+ at this stage?!

Each to their own, but I personally would want a proven business in place with at least 12 months of real turnover to justify any real expense.

When I bought my MH, It was end of year 22 / start of year 23, so I had proven numbers of several decades.

The MH cost me approx 65k.

Previously, a typical 70 nights away per annum was costing me in dinner, B&B, approx €100 per night so €7k PA.

Over 10 years, that’s €70k of dead money or +€5k over what I paid for the MH.

OK, it costs me about double to fuel it over my Skoda Octavia and there is annual insurance and servicing and that all adds up to an additional expense over the car of approx €1.5k PA, so €15k over 10 years.

€65k purchase + €15k additional running costs = €80k over car & hotels etc, but…

Resale of MH after 10 years approx will be around €25-30k so net saving will be around €20-25k over that 10 year period.

Plus as a family, we have a ‘free’ MH for every day I am not working!

But unless your pockets are very deep and your turnover/margins are going to be very high…

Camper + tent + trailer + quad is where I would be starting!

One other option, truck top camper on flatbed pickup because you can dump it any time to go properly off road.

 

[kayasaman]

12 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Are you serious?  A 2U server in a camper?  That's going to be awfully noisy and expect to drain your batteries in about an hour.

If you'd be insistent on a NAS, a 2nd gen Flashstor 12 is probably a better option.  You could probably also power it by DC from your battery pack which is more efficient.
https://www.asustor.com/en-gb/product?p_id=91

Just keep in mind that portable drives will use less power and in many cases, be faster than a 10gE NAS.

IMO, you need to think about your goals.  You're talking about an overlanding rig capable of going anywhere, but then you're talking about a huge 6,000+ pound camper that looks to be about 25 feet long that you'd be towing behind a 16-foot 4Runner.  Those are not compatible configurations.  Even in the video that you linked, the trailers that they were using were much smaller overlanding setups that are about 8-10 feet long.

If your main goal is to get a setup that you can take all over the world and drive into crazy places, my suggestions are:

- Total length of vehicle + trailer is less than 30 feet, better if less than 25, ideally less than 20 (i.e. no trailer at all)
- Choose a vehicle that is available in a lot of places.  If you break down in another country and you're in a car that is available in that country, you have a good chance of finding suitable replacement parts.  If you're in a car that isn't sold in that country, you could be choosing between a long wait for parts (but maybe you'll make new friends in whatever town you're in!) and jerryrigging a solution that will probably break down again
- Similarly, choose a fuel option based on what will be easily available where you're going.  Is gasoline as available in every country as diesel?  By now, probably yes, but you should confirm that.
- Unless you have shore power available every night or plan to run a gasoline generator, you will have a power budget that is determined by how many solar panels you can realistically fit on your vehicle (and potentially some folding ones that you deploy when stationary).  Your solar panels and batteries will be DC devices.  When possible, choose DC powered options over AC powered (~10% efficiency gain/loss) and avoid things that are power hungry.  A Windows gaming laptop with a dedicated GPU can be great for editing footage, but if it's pulling 150W of power while you're editing, you'll drain your battery pretty fast, especially if you're also running Starlink (120W continuous draw for mine with the v2 dishy, the new smaller dishy might be a bit less, and a little less yet if you do DC conversion).
- Conversion to sleeper mode should take only a few minutes and ideally, only a few steps.  A daily 20 minute setup/teardown gets old fast
- Pay attention to weight distribution, you want the heavy stuff on the bottom of the car, as much as possible - that'd be batteries, water, etc.

MrSMW's suggestion of a non-overlanding RV and a dirtbike is a really good one, btw, for many places that one might want to go.  It might limit you a bit in very remote areas, but there's a lot to be said for staying on fairly maintained roads until you don't have to.  You could even split the difference with a 4WD sprinter (I think these can also be lifted a little bit?) which will get you even more places - and a dirtbike can get you that extra little bit.

These are exactly things that I need to think about.... which I'm *not* able to consider at the moment as a) I have no experience and b) I have ASD so that means I "hyperfocus" in directions that I like and don't pay attention to anything else unless there is someone kind enough to make me aware...

 

As for server this is probably more to what I'm looking at:

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/chassis/compact mini-tower/721/sc721tq-350b2

 

But yes battery drain will be a key issue.... I have around 20 of those things in 3x racks at home which we didn't actually have space for so I installed them into what was supposed to be my bedroom. Of course that rendered the room unusable for anything else and you have A/C in there permanently on too...

Oh yeah and the A/V rack in the living room downstairs so:

Constant 12A current draw basically - haha

 

Not sure about Windows gaming laptop? I have a Lenovo P1 Gen5 with integrated Nvidia card running Arch Linux. I do have another slightly smaller 15" Lenovo again workstation based laptop with Nvidia Quadro GFX but currently that's running the house so A/C and central heating etc... is going through that one on a VM.

 

Thanks by the way for all of this!!

 

In the Kazakhstan vid posted above the family took a pop-top trailer linked to an Eneos Granediar. I initially thought it was a Merc G-wagon though... shows you how out of phase I am with things... very different to the 1990s where I used to be able to remember every make, model, price, and spec from a car magazine I collected for many years.

 

Gas should be available everywhere as in central Asia I heard that diesel was a problem?? But I know this from Turkey too in that they don't have proper diesel but something they call Mazot (in Turkish). I think it's low quality diesel mixed with something else that really screws the engine and has wafts of black smoke bellowing out the tail pipes...

 

They do a lot of things here like build vans out eg. Merc Sprinters and then go travel round Europe using those... I wouldn't like that though... as I really want to get off the tarmac and away from civilization as much as possible...

[kayasaman]

10 minutes ago, MrSMW said:

How much budget are we talking here because it’s looking like 100k+ at this stage?!

Each to their own, but I personally would want a proven business in place with at least 12 months of real turnover to justify any real expense.

When I bought my MH, It was end of year 22 / start of year 23, so I had proven numbers of several decades.

The MH cost me approx 65k.

Previously, a typical 70 nights away per annum was costing me in dinner, B&B, approx €100 per night so €7k PA.

Over 10 years, that’s €70k of dead money or +€5k over what I paid for the MH.

OK, it costs me about double to fuel it over my Skoda Octavia and there is annual insurance and servicing and that all adds up to an additional expense over the car of approx €1.5k PA, so €15k over 10 years.

€65k purchase + €15k additional running costs = €80k over car & hotels etc, but…

Resale of MH after 10 years approx will be around €25-30k so net saving will be around €20-25k over that 10 year period.

Plus as a family, we have a ‘free’ MH for every day I am not working!

But unless your pockets are very deep and your turnover/margins are going to be very high…

Camper + tent + trailer + quad is where I would be starting!

One other option, truck top camper on flatbed pickup because you can dump it any time to go properly off road.

 

 

No idea on the budget side right now... what I'm trying to look at basically is parts then get everything together and work out the rest once I am satisfied... it might be that I build things up gradually too so maybe just get say the 4x4 to start with then take local journeys before going further kind of like a telescope if you like

 

The key thing is that I am able to travel and comfortably. With the main agenda being to get out of the city and into environments more suitable for my health issues so that I don't stress out and end up with high levels of anxiety and depression

 

Before I took up photography, I had a period where I couldn't even leave the house for 10 years. It was caused by a panic attack on the way to work one day and that was the end of me... it was only later we found out the reason and learned enough about things to know that the city and crowded places just don't work for me.

So hopefully finding something that I can do and get good at like making adventure and nature videos in the middle of nowhere will be more suitable and fun.

 

Life is difficult is all I can say....

 

[MrSMW]

Car camping!

I partially built out my Skoda Octavia estate for this with one back seat down, raised boot area with slide out cooking facility under the raised rear door.

Inflatable air mattress taking up 50% of the boot and the folded rear seat.

Portable plug in cooler went in the front passenger footwell.

Then it was going to be Porta Potti with one of those pop up toilet tents you can get off Amazon for about 100 quid, but Covid hit and I never finished the full build out and bought a caravan in the second year of that era. Which had aircon!

Power on the go is always a problem, even in my MH and I have a portable battery unit that can be either charged by solar or plugged into the dashboard when the engine is running, ie, when driving is best.

But my MacBook can chew through that in around 2 hours max but if I had an inverter (I think it is), I could plug in to my vans electrics and massive lithium leisure battery. 

On site, plugged into electric, no issues.

The entire car camping set up though (without the cost of the vehicle) was less than 1000 quid, so; cooking kit, coffee maker, flask, 10 litre water tank, air mattress, 4 season sleeping bag, travel cooler, power bank battery, timber, clip on privacy screens for all the rear windows and a curtain on a stretch cord to close of the front seats.

Plenty of jacked up 4WD estates such as Skoda Octavia Scout (which is what I have and on all season tires, can munch through up to nearly a foot of snow. Uphill), Audi, Subaru etc, without going full SUV, though something like a Landcruiser of course is going to have more interior room, specifically head height and can go further of road.

But as you say, start modestly and go from there...

Good luck with it but take a look at pickup truck campers because with that option, you could start with a camping/tent option and then later upgrade to the actual truck top camper unit if and when budget/requirement allows.

[eatstoomuchjam]

50 minutes ago, kayasaman said:

Not sure about Windows gaming laptop? I have a Lenovo P1 Gen5 with integrated Nvidia card running Arch Linux. I do have another slightly smaller 15" Lenovo again workstation based laptop with Nvidia Quadro GFX but currently that's running the house so A/C and central heating etc... is going through that one on a VM.

 

So if you'd be using the Lenovo laptops, you'd need to understand their power draw in the scenarios where you'd be using them and then size battery accordingly.  Newer laptops will use less - and many can be powered by USB-C which makes running from DC trivial.  My macbook (14" m2 max) pulls up to about 100w when doing an export, but I can use it just about all day unplugged if it's just for web browsing, etc.  I'm sure that there are modern Lenovos with the latest Intel or AMD chips that use less power too.  The GPU will still be a power hog, though, generally speaking.

53 minutes ago, kayasaman said:

Gas should be available everywhere as in central Asia I heard that diesel was a problem?? But I know this from Turkey too in that they don't have proper diesel but something they call Mazot (in Turkish). I think it's low quality diesel mixed with something else that really screws the engine and has wafts of black smoke bellowing out the tail pipes...

So that's a vote against diesel, then!  If diesel is problematic in at least one country where you plan to go, then gas is the better option.

54 minutes ago, kayasaman said:

They do a lot of things here like build vans out eg. Merc Sprinters and then go travel round Europe using those... I wouldn't like that though... as I really want to get off the tarmac and away from civilization as much as possible...

A 4WD sprinter, especially if lifted a bit, equipped with off-road tires, and properly weighted, will get you a lot further off-grid than a stock 4 runner towing big heavy camper.  Extra bonus, as far as I know, Sprinters are sold/available in lots of countries.

You could also look into a Delica, especially since you're accustomed to driving on the wrong side of the vehicle already.  It's a Mitsubishi van that was built for off-road performance.  Specs are slightly worse than an Outback which means it's better than about 80% of stock pickups.

(But comments about parts availability are relevant with a Delica!)

[kayasaman]

@MrSMW @eatstoomuchjam - thank you so much guys!! I really appreciate it 😄 

 

Sorry if I sound like a total lost cause, but hopefully I will get there..... 😉

[Django]

Can’t chime in on the vehicle talk but getting back to camera needs I’d look nowhere else than Sony FX3 / FX6. Since OP mentioned lowlight / nightscape / astro. 
 

Pair em with a 24-70mm f2.8 GM.
 

 

[kayasaman]

7 minutes ago, Django said:

Can’t chime in on the vehicle talk but getting back to camera needs I’d look nowhere else than Sony FX3 / FX6. Since OP mentioned lowlight / nightscape / astro. 
 

 

Thanks! I have looked at these too but not too much - guess I should read and watch more of what people are saying on them

 

The FX6 would be unsuitable as it doesn't have an articulating screen so not very useful for vlogging and in a confined space like a car, it would be hard to handle

 

FX3 seems more suitable so will take a look at some sample video of that

 

Oh yeah... one thing about Sony.... it was said that there was some compatibility issue with Davinci Resolve - what was that?

I did a quick Google and looks like everything seems fine as Resolve support slog3!

 

Maybe something to do with difference between Studio and Free version?

[Django]

1 hour ago, kayasaman said:

Thanks! I have looked at these too but not too much - guess I should read and watch more of what people are saying on them

 

The FX6 would be unsuitable as it doesn't have an articulating screen so not very useful for vlogging and in a confined space like a car, it would be hard to handle

 

FX3 seems more suitable so will take a look at some sample video of that

 

Oh yeah... one thing about Sony.... it was said that there was some compatibility issue with Davinci Resolve - what was that?

I did a quick Google and looks like everything seems fine as Resolve support slog3!

 

Maybe something to do with difference between Studio and Free version?

No there are zero compatibility issues with Sony Slog and Davinci.

FWIW Sony were the first to introduce log on a mirrorless camera so its supported in every NLE.

FX3 is super compact so ideal for confined spaces like a car. 

Reason I recommend it is that the FF 12MP sensor is optimal for low-light situations with a second base ISO of 12,800. Other strong points is super low rolling shutter (great for fast run & gun), IBIS and cine features like shutter angle and in-camera LUT support. And it comes with an XLR handle.

Oh and The Creator was shot entirely on it so yeah its pretty legit even on the high end.