2023 Guangzhou Video Expo
I don’t do much. I don’t often go places. I am what most people would consider pretty boring. But when my friend Ran texted me a couple weeks ago and asked if I wanted to go to Guangzhou for some kind of video expo I decided why not. Now this is uncommon. I usually say no. But not this time. I almost immediately regretted it on Saturday when I had to wake up early to meet up with Ran to head out to Guangzhou. But then we got there.
Now I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had a seen a poster for the event but it wasn’t so much a poster by whoever was putting on the event as a posted about the event by one of the companies who was going to be there. Until we got there I wasn’t even sure if it was just Sirui or if there were going to be lots of companies there. There were lots.
It wasn’t a huge event. Not like CES, which I went to a couple months earlier, or even like Madrid Games Week, which I went to both years when I lived in Spain. The room wasn’t that big but they packed a lot of companies in there. We walked in and it was just lenses and lights and audio equipment and cameras and things to mount your cameras on. It was pretty awesome I won’t lie. I walked up and down the aisles of companies showing off their new and/or interesting gear and tech taking it all in. And finding stuff I need. I made a point of checking out tripods, which I’m in the market for. I’ve got a cheap photography tripod I use when I’m filming martial arts stuff for TikTok and YouTube but it’s too small to hold my video camera rig. I need something bigger, maybe with a fluid head, for when we film our short films. So I checked out all the tripods I saw and played around a little with the SmallRig ones.
Then I found new stuff I need. When we’re filming not everything can be on the tripod. Sometimes we need to hold the camera and move around. But it gets really heavy really fast. So when I saw the shoulder rig that Tilta had at their table I fell in love. I’m going to poke around to try to find what’s best, and make sure I have a quick way to attach and detach the camera rig, but I realized almost immediately that a shoulder rid would be a much better way to carry the camera around when shooting.
I also saw cool stuff that I can only imagine filming with. There was a grip to connect a camera to a car door, which seemed to be held on with big suctions cups. I thought that was a dangerous way to attach your camera to a car to it’s very possible I was missing something. There was also a huge robotic arm that you could connect a camera too. I’m not sure if it did something really cool or if it just let you make the camera movements much smoother than a person would be able to do.
Then there were the things I need but really am really not quite sure how to use: lights and audio stuff. Both are really important to eventually improving the short films my friends and I are filming but they’re also both things that I haven’t really jumped into learning how to use yet.
The expo should have been the perfect excuse to start learning how to use lights and mics better, and to learning about some of the cooler stuff I’m unlikely to use, except I was stymied but my old enemy; my bad Chinese. As has been the case since I moved here my subpar Chinese limits me except in very basic things. When I was in college I spent time every day in class studying Chinese but since I moved to China I’ve always worked full time, which makes investing time in learning Chinese difficult. To put it gently. So while there was a lot of stuff there that I was interested in I mostly just looked.
We also didn’t stay super long. I mentioned earlier that the venue was fairly small. The obvious downside to that is that it was packed. It was tough walking around, especially if you wanted to go backwards. It wasn’t a big open space that you could walk around in at will. It was set up as sort of a winding path that went from the door to the big space at the end where the speaker was. And walking against the tide was tough. So after spending a little time walking through and seeing everything we left and made out way back to Shenzhen.
Even though we weren’t there for too long I’d say it was worth going. I don’t think I’d want to do something like that every week but as an every once in a while thing it was pretty fun.
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