Cinegearpro “Universal DSLR Baseplate”

You’d think it would be easy enough to find a decent DSLR baseplate. I mean, what can go wrong? Essentially you’re buying a chunk of metal that attaches your DSLR to a pair of rods. Well, in the case of my camera rig, I’ve had more trouble with baseplates than with any other rig component. I still don’t have one that I’m completely satisfied with.

The first baseplate I bought was a Redrock Micro “microSupport baseplate”. Really solid. Designed for much physically longer cameras than a DSLR, so I could adapt my rig for an FS100, C300, F3, whatever. It’s a great baseplate, and I’m still glad that I bought it. What, then, prompted me to subsequently buy a Cinegear pro baseplate, which I now use on the majority of my shoots?

Two main problems. First, the Redrock baseplate has a lot of weight to it. Much more than the tiny setups out there designed exclusively for DSLRs. Long days of shooting music videos handheld with a considerably front-heavy rig definitely made me question my choice of baseplate. Second, it takes up so much real estate on your rods that it can be hard to position other rig components where you’d otherwise want them to be. I was using 18″ rods, and I wanted to attach a Zacuto arm with a SmallHD DP4 monitor to my rig. Well, getting the magic arm into a postion where the DP4 eyecup could reach my eye was extremely difficult, given that so much space was taken up by the vast aluminium expanses of my Redrock plate. I don’t know if you’d even have enough space at all with shorter rod lengths either.

Anyway. You can see why I looked for a DSLR baseplate with a smaller and lighter presence on my rig. Hence the Cinegearpro “Universal DSLR Baseplate”. I couldn’t find any reviews of this baseplate… no info anywhere. I ended up making a judgement based on pictures alone, which is never a great idea. (this is why I’m going to write about it here)

So, you could argue that I deserved it when my Cinegearpro “Universal DSLR Baseplate” arrived and I discovered that it was the most poorly-machined piece of kit I’d ever seen. I tried to slide it onto a set of rods, and came up against heavy resistance. “Hmm, it’s a bit snug” I was thinking at first. I managed to get the baseplate onto the rods, but in the process of getting them back off, I ended up shredding the glossy coating off the end of each carbon fibre rod. To make matters worse, one of the wingnuts used to tighten the baseplate onto your rig didn’t actually tighten at all, and turning the wingnut made awful crunching noises.

This sounds like a horror story, and it sounds like I’m telling you to never, ever buy one of these baseplates. But it’s not as bad as that. After jamming a rusty pair of scissors into the snug rod-holes (is there a proper name for these holes?)and twisting repeatedly, I managed to scrape off the excess metal that was shredding my rods, and the baseplate slid onto the rig with comparative ease. I never got the left wingnut to tighten properly, but the wingnut on the right was enough to secure my baseplate in position without any danger of it sliding around. The baseplate still wasn’t what I’d imagined based on the pictures, but it worked, and it was much lighter and more flexible than my hulking Redrock plate.

And here’s the best part: the day after I “fixed” this baseplate enough to make it usable, Cinegearpro accidentally sent me another one — which worked perfectly straight out of the box. (Well it was still a bit snug, but I fixed this in under 5 minutes with some violent scissor-work). So now I have one perfectly functional baseplate for my 7D, and another slightly deformed baseplate that I use to mount my Tascam DR-40 sound recorder. Brilliant. (I’ve no qualms with keeping both baseplates, especially given the shocking quality of the first one).

I should quickly say that even my “perfectly functional baseplate” isn’t perfect — screwing the camera onto this baseplate can be a frustrating process as it’s very hard to line up the screw with the thread. It’s easier to do this if you take the baseplate off your rig and attach it to the camera in your lap, but this requires you to disassemble your rig since there’s no quick release plate. You can easily spend 5 minutes on set trying to align the thread, and it’s the most maddening process. Also, make sure you figure out which end is the “front” of your baseplate. There’s nothing obvious to distinguish “front” from “back”, but if you put your camera on backwards, the battery compartment won’t fully open and you’ll need to unscrew the camera to swing batteries.

So there. Now no one can complain that there was no information out there on Cinegearpro’s well-designed but horribly manufactured and dicey DSLR baseplate! It’s light, compact, fairly solid, and it’s the core of my current handheld 7D rig. I have no regrets about getting one.

But don’t say I didn’t warn you.