If you follow me on social media then you know this past week I was in Vegas for CES 2016. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the largest trade show in North America and it is where tech companies show off their latest products. I of course was covering the event for ThinkComputers. Covering the event can be sort of crazy as the show only runs 3-4 days and it is hard to meet with all the companies you want to.

I think we did a great job this year though. We posted over 100 videos and close to 100 articles covering the show. That is almost a 50% increase from last year! Almost all of our content was posted as the show was going on as well. It is great to see the progression of our content and how I’ve improved at doing video content. Of course none of this would be possible without my team! Jack, Derrick, and Mark came with me this year. We separated into two teams: Me & Mark and Derrick & Jack. As I said I have really become comfortable in front of the camera, this was Derrick’s first year so he was a little nervous, but still did a good job. Here is one of the my favorite videos I did from the show.

All of our videos were shot with the Sony Alpha A6000 camera. This camera allows for 1080p video, which is much better than the 720p camera we were using last year. The small compact size of the camera made it easy to carry around the show. For audio we used the Sony ECM-WM1 wireless microphone system with a Sony ECM-CS3 Clip style Omnidirectional Stereo Microphone. The wireless system was much better than using wired mics that we have in the past. Although since they were Bluetooth there was a bit of interference in crowded areas. Also the lav mics were a bit cheap and I think we could of had better audio with better quality mics.

All of our video content was edited using Adobe Premier. I really recommend Adobe’s Creative Cloud for anyone that needs to use Photoshop, Premier or any other Adobe product. Mark did all of the video editing and he created our intro and outro clips as well. To render our videos our friends as Alienware provided us with a Alienware 17 laptop, which made encoding pretty fast! Running around to meetings I used Lenovo’s new Active Gaming Backpack, which is extremely comfortable and had more than enough room inside for accessories and my laptop.

CES is a real drain, you barely get any sleep and you are always on the move. To make sure I survived the week I always had something for breakfast, even if it was just a protein bar. I also made sure everyone had enough water, I had 2 cases of water delivered to our room at the beginning of the week! It is really easy to crash when you don’t eat or get enough water.

CES was a lot of fun to cover this year and I can’t wait to do it again next year!