So, finally, my Snapgears have arrived from Indisystem. Being a dirty limey it’s taken over a month. Brian Valente at Redrock Micro kindly sent over a matte box for our shoot. Unfortunately we’ve nearly finished shooting and it still hasn’t turned up yet, just goes to show you really can’t ever tell how long things are going to take to arrive from the States! First impressions of the Snapgears are that they’re massive, chunky, solid bits of kit. The big selling point is the fact that you literally just snap them together and damn do they work well. I get nervous with magnets around the camera but I’m assured they’re safe. You simply snap them apart, put them vaguely around the lens and the magnets do the rest. Now it’s not like we lose a lot of time fannying about with lens gears, but personally I hate them. The snapgears feel really solid but they’re only designed to fit a very specific size of lens, we’ll have to see whether their design is ultimately flawed. Right now we attach our Redrock lens gears with a bit of elastic from the Rode mic cage I bought simply because we find it quicker than attaching with the screws they come with. We pretty much use the same lens gear for every single lens and the system’s pretty fast. The snapgears are designed to be very fast indeed. We’ll be testing them out this weekend. Which reminds me, we’re going to be live live live live live…. crikey… on sunday. We’ll be posting a timetable of likely events and when we’ll be talking live, and probably getting everything wrong technically, but it’s a first, and, well it should be interesting, and we’ll try and make it a bit of an event. You’ll be able to ask me questions, ask the producers, the writer and the actors questions as well. If that ain’t value for money I don’t what is. Aight.