Safety chain attachment point?

[Dominic Jones]

Hi guys,

This thought just occurred to me - and I'll grant you it's something I should have thought of a lot earlier, but there you go - will the Red One have a safety chain attachment point, so that when shooting from a crane, or jib over the side of a skyscraper etc, the camera can be chained off to prevent it falling in the event of a plate/head failure?

Usually I just use the handle, but you can see where the problem with that's gonna come! Of course if you have the cage you could use an attachment point but (a) I for one don't want to buy the cage just to attach a safety chain to and (b) that still leaves the possibility of a failure on the cage system (unlikely, but still possible) - a good sturdy attachment point on the body itself would be ideal, imo, if that's still possible...

What do you guys think?

[Vincent Rice]

There are screw threads all over the damn thing!

[Dominic Jones]

Are there? Where??

In that case, a little screw-on attachment hook would be a nice little accessory, and much easier for the Red team to implement, I'd guess!

EDIT: OK, you're referring to the 4 screw mount points for the cage, correct? I could imagine these working with a screw-on hook, but a quick question for the Red guys - would these threads take the force of the camera plus a lens, MB, rods system, battery and HDD falling, say 2 feet?? If so, then this might be a good solution. If not, back to my original question!

[Tony Lorentzen]

What about a small hole like the one that are put on laptops for Kensington locks. I think they're pretty strong and the locks and chains are pretty easy to get a hold of.

Shouldn't be too hard to make an extrude-cut on that SolidWorks (?) model, Jim ;-)

[Dominic Jones]

That was kind of what I was thinking of, yes - you'd just need to make sure it was wide enough to allow a steel safety cord through it, as they're not the most manageable of things at times!

EDIT: Sorry, you're suggesting using existing Kensington locks? Good idea *if* they'd be strong enough, but Red rigs could easily run 15lb+ I would have thought, so I'm not sure you'll find one designed to take that sort of strain. Maybe...