Kyde & Eric's New Camera Fund
UPDATE: It's funded 100%! We are stunned, thanks to everyone! We have it on order and as soon as Sony can get us one we will be producing videos with it! We are super stoked for how this is going to make our content look, can't wait to share it with everyone. Any contributions above and beyond the cost of the gear will be going to....other gear! We have our eye on the new GoPro, for example. We also have an Amazon Wish List linked below if you want to help us with gear directly. Anyways, wow, thanks again to everyone!

(Original Post:) Hi! We want to buy a new camera rig that is pretty far outside of our typical equipment budget. If you are interested in helping us upgrade or are just curious what we are looking to get thanks for dropping by.

You can see where our fund stands over on the right. Down below you can find an explanation as to what we hope to get from a new camera rig and how we expect it to improve our videos.

This is a list of what we are looking to upgrade to.

Sony A7S iii Camera Body........................$3500
Tamron 17-28F/2.8 Lens..........................$940
Sony NP-FZ100 (x2)...............................$160
Sony ECM-B1M Mic..................................$350
128 GB V90-2 SD Cards (x4)...................$680
New Bag to fit new camera.......................$100
*Shipping of camera to Japan....................$180
Total......................................................$5,910

If you'd like to contribute to our camera fund you can do so through the Paypal link below. You can use any major credit cards, etc, you don't need to already have money in the PayPal system. See down below for more details about the gear.
Thanks!

Things we expect this gear to improve:
-Ability to show a drastically more accurate representation of what the world looks like. Specifically the dynamic range this camera is capable of will help us film outside in scenes where lighting is constantly shifting. For instance walking through a forest or anywhere with lots of sunlight and also harsh shadows. Our current gear squashes all the colors and does a poor job of showing the viewer what the scene actually looks like in real life in these cases. As conveying reality is very important to our project this is a big one for us.

-The new camera has vastly better low light ability. This is a big problem with our current camera as it requires us to boost the image brightness when editing quite often, which introduces a lot of "noise" in the image and kills the colors even more. A side effect of the poor low light ability is the auto-focus on the camera failing in dim settings. The Sony we hope to buy can essentially see in the dark, it's amazing.
-Our current camera has a very "soft" image unless filming in perfect lighting conditions and filming on the move we don't have the ability to control lighting. The new camera is much better about capturing a sharp image in uncontrollable lighting settings.

-The new camera moves into a "pro" level of gear. As such it can film to two memory cards at the same time so if there is a failure on one card you have a backup. We sometimes lose shots due to such errors and re-filming things that are unscripted while you are trying to be natural makes such failures critical.

-The new camera supports a microphone that can pick up sound in front of it *or* from all around it. (there is a selector switch on it.)  When one of us is filming behind the camera and the other is in front with our current microphone it only picks up the person in front of the camera. Being able to set the mic to pick up from all directions would be a big advantage to us as it could pick up both of our voices. The microphone also hooks directly into the camera and has no cable. The microphone cable going bad or coming loose on our current camera is basically our nightmare scenario as it can leave us with destroyed or no audio at all and has caused us to lose footage on more than one occurrence. Getting rid of that cable would be a dream.

-The new camera supports 4k. We do not expect to move to 4k right now as the file sizes will likely be too large for us to be able to manage at the moment, but as storage space becomes more affordable it's something we will eventually move to. That said, the 1080p on the Sony is some of the best looking 1080p that exists and still includes all the benefits listed above. By the way, because I expect this to raise questions of those who are for some reason upset that we are asking for support this directly so I will address it here. Without getting into the weeds it basically boils down to that we can't afford such equipment otherwise but know it would add value to our video project and help us tell the stories more accurately.

For those of you wondering about our Patreon and Youtube ad revenue: Without Patreon support our project would be long since dead so the support we receive there is incredibly appreciated. That said, it covers the costs of the videos to be shot (transport, hotel, gas, food, income taxes, etc) and my time to manage the entire project with editing and social media management, etc. We'd like to keep our project funded without flooding everyone who watches with ads from VPN sponsors or traveling to places that are paying us to do so, which would corrupt the reality of the content we produce.

Oh, and Youtube ad revenue is *maybe* a couple hundred bucks a month if we are lucky, it adds up to very little, haha.

But in the end, this is just an avenue for people who can and want to help us out a bit, if this isn't you you absolutely can keep watching our content guilt free, haha. Thanks for reading my wall of text!

*Shipping: So, the camera sold in Japan is language region locked to Japanese. The American version is not. I am importing an American version, thus the shipping fee (including insurance). Oh, the American version is cheaper than the Japanese version as well.