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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?"
How about talent?
How about a better room to film in than the bathroom? Seriously, are we going to be expected to line up around the block for "SteadyShit"
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I stumbled upon this site about a year ago and, being an ametur filmmaker, decided to give it a try. The parts were cheap and it really was quite easy to put together. But don't expect it to be perfect. It takes a little while to get the feel of it, and even then you won't be getting perfectly steady shots while running quickly. But for the price, it's tough to beat.
YEAY!...Now I can look even stupider when I visit other places and take meaningless film I'll never watch again.
Every windows user is a sadomasochist.
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.
more links and such.
memepool
These are cheap enough to use with a picture phone. And with the inverting bracket, we can now have upskirt shots without the blur!
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How'd he manage to build it without Duct tape!? Now that's impressive.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
Wow thats got a dual purpose, works to keep your movement from interefeing with the shot and if the actors get out of line you can break it down and beat em with the pipe, also works great for self-defense when shooting ghetto style.
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
xox,
Dead Nancy
I always wanted to use one of those industrial strength ones to build the machine gun supporting apparatus from Aliens. :)
this isn't really new, I studied under the great Steven Speilbergo and we used these all the time.
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Saw this in RES magazine last year. Built one in under 30 mintues and with exactly $16 worth of parts. It actually works too, though you do have to practice with it to get good at controling your own body movement. Also, I reccomend making the lower section about 50% longer than the upper section to further even out movement.
Please mark as "Overrated" due to poster's plea not to be moderated as redundant and the fact it's boring and not really related to this discussion at all.
Actually, more of a Kubrick wannabe
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.
How the fsck do you /. a .edu system?
Holy shit!
Like any of you jog, let alone with a camcorder.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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 was able to load the site, and printed a copy to PDF. Download it here! (right-click, save as)
The $14 Steadycam
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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.
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
Getting good results is not so much about the equipment, but how you use it.
I tried that bit on my girlfriend but she didn't fall for it.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
This "dude" has obviously violated the SteaduCam patent as per the DMCA. Gentlemen, quite simply, this is IP rape, of the vilest order. I'm notifying the patent holder immediately.
"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).
The 14$ thingy is pure crap...
if you want some real inspiration check out the following websites:
http://homebuiltstabilizers.com/
The original site for all your home built video needs
http://pub173.ezboard.com/bhomebuiltstabilizers
Discussion forum full of lots of useful information
http://www.codydeegan.com/
Might take a bit more effort, but the results are incredible. Cody's plans are awesome, and I would gladly purchase them again.
With the exception of the Steadicam JR, most Steadicams have a body harness. That makes them much more stable than using you hand.
This is really more similiar to a lower end Glidecam stabilizer (even this is floating).
There are also some rather cheap alternatives out there to make a camcorder smoother.
Granted this is significantly cheaper to make than these products, but from my experience anything that is handheld doesn't work as well as the bodyrigs. Personally, I'd rather just do it by hand alone.
You also might want to check out a relatively cheap jib too.
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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.
I saw a documentary about Garrett Brown, and it showed his various prototype stages. The original one looked exactly like this - a length of pipe. The second one was more like a pantograph to try to keep the camera level. Then he added the seperate handle connected to the upright portion wih a gimbal. The rest of the development was on the counter-balance arm and the vest. All of this was necessary because Brown was building these for 35mm film cameras.
If you're looking to improve this design, the things I'd look at are: a gimbal, so allow the operator to hold the unit more comfortably and lightly, and avoid transferring hand motion to the camera; a sliding mount at the top, to allow the camera's balance to be shifted forward and back to tilt up or down.
The Steadycam JR Lite is a great one to look at. It was designed by the great Frogdesign studio (the NeXT cube). The camera sits on top of a slide, and right on top of the gimbal and handle. The arm is divided into two parts at a 90 degree angle, connected to the slide at 45 degrees. And the whole thing folds up. It's a wonderfully slick design - and obscenely overpriced.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
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A monopod with a handle isn't a steadycam. Steadycam uses gimbals, springs and a bodymount to basically put a shock absorber between you and the camera.
All this does is add more weight - which will help you hold your modern teeny-tiny camera steady, but's that's far cry from being able to hold the camera still while you jog up the Art Museum steps.
Clear, Dark Skies
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.
How weird is it to go to the site, read the text, then watch the movie, only to see some very familiar backgrounds. I then looked at the url and realized that it is from the same school I go to. No wonder the download was so fast :)
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In the end, it's not your equipment it's how you use it (no pun intended). So stop wasting your money on the latest 8 Megapixel digicam and 3 CCD camcorder. Read this guy's note: "These samples, as well as all of my own films, were captured with a $300 Sony Digital 8 Camcorder (the cheapest digital camcorder you can buy)." Until you shoot as good as he does (which is exceptional, have a look - click on his name at the very top and prepare to be amazed), you're completely wasting your money on even a $1000 camcorder. Accept it, learn from it.
Must-not-watch TV!
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.
Walkie-talkies.
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When I was in high school making short films, I tried building a ghetto steadicam, but found it much easier to not use one and fix the footage in post with some software I found called SteadyHand, from Dynapel. I bought it, but the demo version actually only puts a watermark in a corner, so theoretically you could just crop it out if you wanted to do it that way.
Nowadays I would probably fix it in combustion, where I'd have more control over it.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Maybe this will help out some of the people who make amateur porn and just can't seem to hold the camera still. Just don't let John Ashcroft find out.
Am I the only one who think's he's the real-life version of John Lithgow's character in Footloose?
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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
LotR Peter Jackson's first film, Bad Taste, apart from being completely superb, was done on an extremely low budget. The documentary about it, Good Taste Made Bad Taste, shows a lot of things they had to make themselves, including a steadicam. I'm not sure how little money they actually made it for, but it was bugger all and it was back in 1987.... Don't write people who make their own Steadicams off...
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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Stanley Kubricks interpretation of the King novel "The Shining" was the first major usage of this technology. The Steadicam allowed for those all so eeary follow shots of Danny throughout The Outlook Hotel's expanses. DualityOfTheShining *Note: All interior shots in the Outlook are done on a sound stage, amazing.
As a bonus, he has a great sense of humor...
If you don't care the hours the building takes, then I'd suggest building something like this guy did: a full steadicam-like setup with a vest, two suspension arms, a fully working gimbal and all the stuff this $14 poor man's "steadicam" has. The costs? About $30, plus 20 hours of work. Sure, it looks ugly but you can't beat the price for the functionality. You'll need stabilizer arms for a stable picture while running or glimbing stairs.
(As a sidenote, "SteadiCam" is a trademarked term. Wikipedia has more information about steadicams in general.)
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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.
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.