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Build Your Own Steadicam
John Jorsett writes "Always wanted to film one of those cool 'walking' sequences, where the camera stays rock-steady as you trudge along? Well, so did Johnny Chung Lee, except he didn't want to lay out major cash for a professional Steadicam rig, so he built his own for $14. He further claims you can do it in about 20 minutes if you know what you're doing. What more could a cheap, impatient Spielberg wannabe ask for?"
The videos are pretty interesting. Sony should make a commercial version of this, if they can make it for $14. Isn't it amazing how much cooler things sound with a soundtrack.
Posted to /. with videos on the page to show sample footage. I'd say he's about to get hosed, but he is at CMU so I doubt it'll blink.
As I was reading his setup I was really expecting his footage to look like crap, but after watching the sample they really are incredibly smooth given that it was only $14 to make. Props.
LEGO (C) Hand Held Stabilizer
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Dead Nancy
I always wanted to use one of those industrial strength ones to build the machine gun supporting apparatus from Aliens. :)
Especially since the original steadicam design was based on a principle obtained from the "rickshaw".
I used to work for the company that made the steadicam (Cinema Products). But that was a long-ass time ago.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Bruce Campbell in "If Chins Could Kill" relates some of the improvised steady-cams used in 'Evil Dead', especially for running shots or window shots.
They just had 2 people carry a heavy board with the camera through the forest, and had a 'camera plus battering ram' for the crash-through bits.
A lot less elegant than this design, basically, the idea of "really heavy = not much vibation or wobble" worked for them.
A.
with a background in marching band (or martial arts) and steady hands.
All he's doing is adding a weight to make it hard for you to move your hands. And you can tell he's having a rough time with it as many of the shots are crooked. It's not properly weighted on the other side so he has to push down with one hand, up with the other and maintain a horizontal position throughout the shot. And he can't do it so the image is tilted most of the time. He'd have a chance of keeping the horizontal straight if he made a "T" instead of an "L"
This is why real steady cams are mounted on the chest like a snare drum. The springs/hydrolics take care of the vertical bounce and the mounting position balances the horizontal. The operator would have to bend over to one side to tilt the shot. If you want to get an "up" shot you bend over, point the camera up and walk backwards.
This is also why most movies move the camera around a lot. Besides it adding to the scene. It's actually easier to keep a steady path of movement than to hold a camera still.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I've built one of these too, and all things being equal, I think you would be better off spending $120 to get one of the Steady cam clones. True, he has some cool shots on his page but those are not nearly as easy as he makes it out to be. Maybe I am just clumsy.
When I walk forward my system wants to behave like a pendulum causing the camera to rock forward and back around the horizonal fulcrum. If things aren't perfectly balanced it is very difficult to keep the cameras tilt at a given attitude. Your left hand (if you were the author in the photo on the page) will not be able to keep the attitude without pendulum style oscillation. It's also difficult to make the camera turn around the camera of the horiontal bar and the fact that the rotational inertia of the person-pipe-camera system is not appropriate for turning around the camera.
Beyond those basic problems: it's also hard to hold on to and I tend to smack into door frames and innocent bystanders with the horizonal pipe.
One of the key parts to a steady cam rig is a gimbal joint that isolates tilt/tip motions of your hand from the "mass" that has the camera. Without this isolation it's really hard to get good shots without Zen master balance or just being lucky.
If anyone out there wants to make a Steady-cam like rig, I suggest they copy something like the Flowpod. Note the gimbal connecting the handle to the body of the device.
By using a cam corder with image stablization with this device I would think the cam corder would correct the shaking the device dosen't.
However the results would obveously get progressivly worse as you add shaking.
But if you don't push your luck the device and image stabilisation together could produce perfict results.
At least I think so....
Cripes, it's a T-shaped pipe arrangement with a weight. Steadicam it ain't.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
In the two minutes it took me to skim the page and hit reload, his counter went up by 780. I wonder how long it will take before either the network admin shuts down his account or it wraps around. :)
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
"This is also why most movies move the camera around a lot. Besides it adding to the scene. It's actually easier to keep a steady path of movement than to hold a camera still."
Keeping a camera still is trivial if you use a tripod. A steady path of movement gets expensive (in crew and equipment) quickly. The steadier you want it the more it costs. Even getting a non-jerky pan multiplies the cost of a tripod time ten.
The reason that movies move the camera a lot is because that is usually what tells the story best.
It ran in the 80's, briefly. It was a special-effects howto for 16mm and 8mm. There was an article in one that described how to build a better "steadicam" than this, using pvc pipe and springs. I think that one actually worked better than the one in this article, as it handled horizontal as well as vertical. It also strapped to the body. The author received a cease & desist from the Steadicam people (he offered to sell completed versions of his as well).
Some type of stedicam can really make a difference in low budget films. Sure wish I had one back in the day. I did buy a Glidecam 3000 (discontinued... but very similar to the one on the right) for $300 on ebay a couple years back. It works quite well though it gets mighty tiring on the arm after a few minutes. I'm using a Canon GL1 these days, which is a bit heavier than most consumer cameras.
One thing that I found very interesting about the whole steadicam thing is that it's not so much XYZ movement that causes visible camera shake, but the rotational movements (heading, pitch, bearing). That's what the gimbal mechanism on a steadicam eliminates. My model is handheld and doesn't have a spring loaded arm or vest, so there's still a fair amount of XYZ movement... but the shots still look stable.
With the camera usually looking at objects several feet away, moving up or down a fraction of an inch doesn't change the field of view much. But tilting the camera forward or back even a tiny amount changes the field of view a great deal. This wasn't intuitive to me until I tried the thing out.
Without any real experience, I doubt this guy's rig (basically a big weighted handle) is going to make shots much steadier than a careful handheld shot. I'd surely give it a try though, if I wasn't already set.
Anyways, steadicams are pretty cool.
Cheers.
But more often, the server. I've worked at the same university for about 6 years now, and at the various departments, we've been slashdotted a few times. Biggest difference between problems and smooth sailing? Dynamic content. At the school paper, it's a 100% static system. A PERL script takes all the stories and images and composes a bunch of static pages. This works well since the old content never changes (it's an archive of the news as released on that day). It ran on a dual P2 system and just laughed it off. I mean the system could have served more than it's 10MB link, if it has been asked to.
Just receantly the department I now work at got slashdotted (the meteor impact simulator). It was on a Sunblade with deceant stats, and the load average shot to 98 within a couple minutes. We finally offloaded it to a brand new (as in got it a week ago) Sun blade doing nothing but hosting that simulator and it was STILL at about a 25 load average, though it stayed up and serving.
Here we were on a much improved network (dual gig backbone to 3x OC-3s as opposed to the 10mb to 1x DS-3 back in the newspaper days), servers an couple orders of magnitude more powerful, and one dedidacted to serving, and yet got hit much harder. The big difference was the content was dynamic. The network wasn't even strained (it was all text anyhow) but the server was being asked to do a ton.
In this case it looks all static, so I'm guessing it's probably either the connection, or general load on the system. After all, this isn't his server, it's a departmental server, and probably one with a lot of users.
Just building a weighted shoulder mount. The problem with damn DV cams these days is they are TINY, Some of them, I can almost wrap my hand completely around. Little thing like that is really hard to keep steady. It's hard to even get a good 2-handed grip on it. Well you could probably get pretty good results be designing a mount for it that rested on your shoulder and added about 5-10 pounds. It then has a brace, and some weight to it, like a real professional camera.
I mean watch a football game. There are tons of shoulder mounted shots that are quite good. As with anything, the skill of the operator is a large factor, but you don't need a stedicam to get a deceant shot, just a solid unit on your shoulder. Probably better than this, since this unit is going to want to act like a pendulum when faced with motion.
There's a limit to what you would want image stabilization to correct. If it's too strong, deliberate motions are filtered out.
Anyway, what I'm really looking forward to is the $18.50 jib.
Buy a pair of wrist weights and wear them whenever you can.
Seriously.
I play baritone in a competitive drum & bugle corps, and the first thing I did when our winter rehearsals started was to purchase a pair of wrist weights (a G baritone bugle weighs about 7 pounds, and we are expected to hold them in front of our faces for up to two hours or more at a time, repeated throughout the day). I wear them whenever I practice, whenever I just hold the horn up, and anytime else where it's not blatantly inappropriate. After about a month, not only was the horn easier to hold up, but--surprise surprise--my hands were generally a hell of a lot steadier than before.
With steady hands, you don't need a steadying device for the camera--and the stronger arms are an added plus.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Final Cut Pro has a filter that supposes to do this, but I'll be damned if I've ever seen it work. I've used it to change footage from totally unusable to unusuable and very annoying. Maybe some FCP guru can set me straight.
I believe some consumer cameras do this for small, high frequency vibrations in software and using tiny little servos to move something in the lense/sensor assembly. I've never seen that in a professional type camera.
It's best to just get your footage right the first time. "Fixing it in post" is for lazy and stupid directors. Good idea though, if you have all year. Sorry!
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Remember the movie with the amazing closeups of migratory birds in flight? That was all image stabilization.
Image stabilization done in postprocessing should really be able to do an amazing job, since it can even (in effect) anticipate the future, which no mechanical system could do. But the loss of resolution from digital zooming (or alternately, a dynamically resizing black border) may be a deal killer.
The reason most people don't watch what they filmed is because they lack this piece of software: muvee autoProducer
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VirtualDub users can try Deshaker, which sounds like it does exactly what you want it to do. If you want to see the type of output it produces, here's a page where someone actually tests it out on real camcorder footage...alternately, you could just try it yourself.
We do this kind of thing all the time. The biggest problem is with motion blur. If the camera is shaking around, even if you stabilize the motion you still get motion blur, which tends to 'buzz' the image in a completely terrible way.
Now, before you kids start saying "well, just turn down the shutter speed", you do run out of light pretty soon. Modern CCD cameras, though, can do amazing things with short shutter times, and in that case your idea of stabilization after-the-fact will work just fine.
If you're going to have to move the image more than about 5% of the frame size, you will want to do a perspective distortion rather than just slide the image around in 2D. As the other responder says, you should frame wide, so that you don't lose too much of your scene when you stabilize. One nice thing about shooting on film is that we typically have a large amount of exposed film that gets cropped out of the movie when printed. This give us a substantial amount of leeway for stabilization.
Go for it! Have fun! Write me at thad@hammerhead.com if you need more help.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
helped get me a modeling gig. Marching band teaches you how to walk both confidently and with style.
In my old school marching band was just walking up and down the street. In my new school it was walking up and down the street I think once or twice but the rest of the time it was doing half time shows and competitions with formations and whatnot which was really cool. I had to learn how to basically run and play at the same time while keeping the instrument level.
Kind of like running with a video camera and not bouncing it around.
A lot of people don't get the practical applications of things like that because they're too concerned with not being "geeky" and just plain short sighted.
And this is why schools tend to cut music programs while the athletic department gets gobs of money.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
There's a cute trick you can use to do impromptu steadicam work.
All you need is a tripod (the heavier the better).
Collapse the legs so they are as short as possible.
Make a peace sign with your hand.
Use those two fingers, curled up (palm up) to hold the tripod under the camera base, so the whole thing is supported on the tips of your two fingers.
The weight of the tripod legs will put the center of mass under the support point (your fingers).
Your arm muscles, tendons and ligaments make natural dampeners.
I've use this several times with good results.
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Create Your Own Camera Boom
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I haven't used these, but your comment about the modified monopod suggests that Chung Lee's design could be modified to make it lighter. If a weight at the end of (an aluminum) monopod works well, then the steel pipes in Lee's solution may not be the best solution.
What is the Physics? Is it the overall weight of the assembly with its CG (center of gravity) at your hand that helps? Or is it the counter balancing effect of the pedulum? Can you get a better smoothness to weight ratio by moving the weight out onto the pendulum head?
I don't have a great feel for this without trying it, but I suspect you would get better performance by increasing the lever arm. In the same way that a tight rope walker uses a longer pole, or a weight lifter uses a longer bar, moving the weight out on the lever arm helps maintain balance.
You can probably use this design with aluminum struts instead of steel pipe struts and get similar performance, though you will probably have to increase the pendulum weight a little. The total weight may be less. I wonder how much raw carbon-fiber tube costs? Maybe it is affordable if you buy it as a material.
The real issue here, what makes this solution viable, is low head weight. The expensive solutions are targeted towards professional cameras that easily weigh 15 lbs: Sony Betacams, the DSR 300 - 500s and such, and the the top of the line steadycams are for 35mm film cameras. Smoothing a consumer handycam is a much easier problem. As the image quality on tiny cameras goes up homemade solutions will become much more significant.
Actually no, an idiot can talk down the economy before they even get into office, which is what the idiot dubya did. Clinton warned dubya repeatedly to not say the economy was tanking, dubya disregarded those warnings. Anything to win.
When I built a stabilizer rig, I used a nail and a Jack Daniels whisky shot glass for the gimbal. The nail's point was rounded, and was at the center of gravity of the rig. It sat in the shot glass, which I held. This allowed for plenty of horizontal rotation, and about 30 degrees of tilt.