Ryan EssmakerInterview
Designer, developer (The Great Discontent)
Adapted from Ryan Essmaker's interview on Uses This, published 28 January 2014. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
Right now, I'm rocking the first-gen 15" MacBook Pro Retina with a 500GB SSD and 16 gigs of RAM.
Thunderbolt Display+ 37 others
I connect that to one of two Thunderbolt displays - one at home and another at Crush Studio.
I typically set the MBP up on a Rain mStand when using a display.
I sit on an Aeron chair at the studio and a shitty Ikea dining chair at home.
In my pocket, you'll find a space gray iPhone 5S 64gb - I recently upgraded from a white iPhone 4S and, damn, is it fast in comparison.
For in-person interviews, we use the Roland R-05 recorder, which I can't recommend enough.
I've been stocking up on Lacie Rugged Thunderbolt/USB 3 drives since working on more video and that's proved to be a very solid decision.
I also have the 40mm pancake, but don't find myself using it as much as I had hoped.
When shooting film, I sport a Contax G2 with a Zeiss 35mm f2 Planar or one of several 35mm point-and-shoots or stereoscopic cameras.
And if you're interested in what guitars I play, I own two Martin acoustics - a DC-1E and a much older and beat up, DM.
Communication
Productivity
Browser
Notes
Security
Coding & Development
Design
InDesign will be used a little more in 2014 as I'm planning to do more print projects.
Media
For video editing projects, I'm torn between the aforementioned Adobe Premiere and Apple's Final Cut Pro X.
When color grading, I really like Blackmagic's DaVicini Resolve, although the roundtrip from FCP/Premiere to Resolve is a bit of a pain.
Audio Hijack Pro is what we use for recording interview audio and it's performed like a true champ.
Storage
Other
I use and love Adobe Creative Cloud and much prefer it over the older upgrade model.
xScope helps when things don't look quite right and I need a quick measurement.