[Benjamin Holland]

Mark, you make a good point. There are certainly situations in which an un-tethered system, no matter how ungainly, is the best way. A few considerations make this solution desirable, as you say, in some situations:

1. Recent years have brought very lightweight cameras. My go to is an Fs5 with a Fujinon MK 18-55. This setup is so light that with an umbilical of this kind, it becomes a featherweight kit, despite having a lot of functionality. This can lead to a lot of cost and time savings due to smaller sliders, jibs, gimbals, etc. Also, having that on the shoulder without all the rigging is a dream. The system would be able to be hot-plugged. So handing the cam off to an ac or dropping it on the cart would be a simple matter of unplugging it.

2. Pre-rigging. I have worked on numerous sets in which a handful of people spent an hour or so of well paid time in a costly hotel conference room rigging up several highly involved cameras, and then again at the end of the day to tear down. With a setup like this. The accessories, where all of the complexity lives, could live, pre-rigged in a small bag. Transporting during the shooting day also becomes much easier because a camera without all the gak can be easily tossed into a porta-brace.

3. Camera switching. One “AC Bag” could be used on a shoot that contains multiple camera options, or secondary cameras simply for convenience. Instead of moving the camera from one rigging situation to another, you could just grab another camera and easily transfer all the connected accessories from one to another via a single cable change.

Whether I could find enough customers? That is the big question. Would you buy/rent one?