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DSLR RIG REVIEW

January 23^rd, 2010192

by Sebastian WöberJanuary 23^rd, 2010

Cinevate:

Cinevate has a very pretty homepage, with very clean, professional looking designs, and very emotional advertising clips that let you understand, that customers are very important to Cinevate.

When we received their gear, its quality didn’t reflect what we had expected after seeing the ads. We ended up getting a lot of cheap looking plastic parts, and unfortunately, poorly manufactured gear.

What we received were the parts for a handheld rig and we tried to make it suitable for a tripod first, to be reviewed with other complete setups here.

The base plate is very long and goes on the rails via an articulated second part that has two knobs. You can adjust two points of articulation with those two screws and you can either set the base plate in an n-shaped or z-shaped manner, forward or backward.

We noticed that although those knobs have thumb screws on them, they cannot be tightened sufficiently by hand. We had to use an “L” wrench to get them real tight, but even then these parts were always movable with a little force. This shouldn’t happen, since it is the core of the whole setup, and should provide the most stability.

Unfortunately, when we shot these photos we didn’t realize the z shaped setup, was actually the one Cinevate intended us to use, it would also provide more stability, we’re sorry for that and we will of course take our later findings into consideration for this review. Here is a shot of the base plate setup the correct way:

When we used the base plate z-style, backwards like on this picture we realized it was too high, and does not comply with the 15mm LW standard, which defines that the lens center has to be 85mm from the rails. Every common matte box has that height. Common matte boxes wont work perfectly this way. The Cinevate base plate has about the same height as the DvTec handheld rig, we will show you later in this review. It’s approximately 5mm too high.
Also, you won’t be able to use a Zacuto Z-finder, unless you move the camera backwards all the way, but you can only do that with a longer lens than the one we used here. This base plate cannot be used with a short lens and the camera mounted at the back, for use with the Z-Finder, because the lens gear would not fit anymore.