I recently posted about my issues satisfactorily mounting the Tascam DR-60D to my camera. I wanted to avoid a huge rig with rails or cages and keep my low profile shooting setup. The Tascam is a great unit, especially at it's current price online. My only complaint was that the unit's plastic construction leads to a crappy mount point at the bottom with some play that works its way up to the lens and adds some camera shake. It's also just not fun to work with something that feels delicate and I didn't want to break my new toy, ahem, important production equipment.
Anyways, I decided to see what I could do to better integrate the recorder into my setup so I looked at all my random mounting gear and came across an older piece of kit called 'The Multiplate." The Multiplate is a kickstarter project that is essentially a milled aluminum block with 1/4" 20 mounting points all around for adding accessories including 15mm rails, handles, or monitors. For awhile I used it with RAM mounts to attach my handheld field recorder to the side. It's now out of kickstarter and in regular production and available for purchase at http://longhaulgear.com/
So to make a solid rig, I simply mounted the DR-60D to the rear of the Multiplate, rotated so it is horizontal with the top facing front and the bottom facing back. I still get full view of my camera's viewfinder and I can clearly see and control the levels. There's no wiggle or play at all. It looks a bit awkward, but for me it's a lot more stable and usable than mounting it directly under the camera. I prefer having an elongated profile compared to a tall one and it's so solid that I can go handheld and use the recorder as a chest stabilizer which is nice. It's a simple solution to an annoying issue.
If anyone else has clever mounting solutions I'd be happy to see them as well. Less than perfect build quality is unfortunately the price of affordable audio gear like the 60D but it's a great tool in the field and I'm happy I've found a way to reliably integrate it into my workflow. I'm sure many people don't have the multiplate, but I hope my setup can help out anyone who has had difficulty with mounting recorder and staying small and light. I'm relatively new to the community here but I want to try and be as helpful as possible and be a contributing member to DVX user.
Myy well worn multiplate. I've dremeled off one edge to get it to jibe with my Nikon's battery release, it's sized for Canon models.
Definitively more affordable for many customers. Ideally, we could even imagine stacking two "basic monoplates" would lead to almost the same possibilities as one "deluxe multiplate"...