While the consumerism supported by Black Friday can be depressing (Stampedes shouldn't be required for people to afford holiday goods), as cash-strapped filmmakers we are always on the lookout for a deal, and so we've assembled some of the best in advance of this Black Friday to help you make your movie—from the first time you print the script all the way to post-production delivery. Most of these deals have already started and will be good through "Cyber Monday," next Monday, November 28th, though in the past some particularly popular deals have sold out.
Teradek
Top of the list is a rare Black Friday sale from Teradek. Wireless video is now basically a requirement on most film sets, and this holiday sale is an affordable way to bring the market leader to your set. Particularly interesting to us, since we love the Serv, is the "Buy Two Serv Pro units and get a link" which gives you a battery powered wifi router which is perfect for on set use.
Credit: Teradek
SmallHD
SmallHD's Black Friday sale includes one of our favorite small monitors, the 702 OLED. It's the only color accurate small monitor in its size and price point, and if you are tired of clients and directors on set asking if they can trust your on camera monitor for color, this is the solution. The 702 OLED discount is $500, but other bundles from this popular monitor manufacturer have discounts up to $800.
Credit: SmallHD
MZed Education for Creatives
MZed Education for Creatives has a whole host of discounts, including a whopping $750 discount on their cinema sound program. Considering how much cinema sound is a misunderstood area, this is a great method for diving deeper into the field.
- MZed Pro 12-month subscription - $199, save $100
- Philip Bloom’s Cinematic Masterclass - $149, save $50
- MZed Pro subscription + PB’s Cinematic Masterclass - $329, save $169
- Cinema Sound (to own forever, download and stream) - $249, save $750
- All other courses and modules 50% off to own forever, download and stream (excluding PB’s Cinematic Masterclass)
Red Giant
Red Giant runs a slightly different holiday sale, with everything in the Red Giant catalogue an astounding 40% off for December 5th. In addition, in a move pretty much no one else in the industry can match, Red Giant lets you combine discounts, so if you are a student or teacher this deal is amazing. For instance, the academic discount takes the price of the full magic bullet suite down from $899 to $449 (yep, that's slightly more than 1/2 off). Then you can apply the 40% discount on top of that, bringing the price to $269. Adding the student discount and the 40% together generates amazing deals on the popular plugin and other post production tools. They are also have a contest you can enter by retweeting their tweet with a variety of cash prizes. It's the best prices you'll see all year on Red Giant tools. If you are going for the student discount, be sure to pre-qualify, as we imagine that on December 5th they'll be pretty busy and might not be able to do last minute academic certification.
B&H
B&H always does a big holiday push, and we found a few interesting items with worthwhile discounts this year. $600 off on the 5D Mark IV. $100 off the popular Fujfilm X-T2. $1800 off the LG C7 OLED TV. $1100 off the Mac Pro Desktop, along with some other aggressive Apple deals though with the upcoming iMac Pro and promises new Mac Pro now might not be the time to spend money on Apple products.
Credit: Fujfilm
Other Great Deals
ActionVFX: 55% off on Black Friday with sign up for the newsletter from this VFX elements powerhouse.
FilmConvert: The film grain and emulation plugin is offered at 1/3 off this week. Get plugins for Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and more for only $99, or the whole Bundle for $149.
CAME-TV: CAME have a variety of discounts on their Boltzen lights and Spry and Prophet Gimbals
Wooden Camera: Matte Box, Follow Focus, Sun Shade and handgrip discounts
HIVE: This LED is designed in Los Angeles and offers a tremendous amount of control over the precise color of your light: $100 off for Black Friday.
DJI: If you are ready to drone, this is a great place to start with deals of including $100 for "starter" Spark drone up to $150 for larger birds.
Insta 360: The best price/benefit ratio in 360° capture at the moment is even better with more than 20% some items.
Final Draft 10: $100 off, a massive drop from $249 to $149 for the premiere script formatting software.
Sony: The filmmaker beloved A7S II is $300 off this holiday season, among many other discounts.
Sigma Art Lenses: Deals between $50-100 off from these popular still photo lenses.
Boris FX: deals up to 50% off popular plugins and Mocha Pro.
Flanders Scientific: their best deal is $500 of the BM240 color accurate grading monitor.
CALDIGIT: Discounts up to 30%
G Drive: Savings of up to $150 if you spend $600.
Our last little favorite deal is the Brother double sided (duplex) printer. We've bought three of these over the years (they all still work; the business just kept growing), and they are great. The Black Friday deal is usually a great time to get them, and is in fact when we bought twp of them in years past. Laser printers have the cheapest per-page price for printing, double sided saves the environment, and reading a script or sharing prep materials on physical paper is still very much a thing, even in 2017. $143.99 at B&H with the high yield cartridge, with a $30 savings over normal price.
As always, we wish you a happy holiday season and we hope whatever deals we shared will help you make better movies!
