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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?
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!
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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
this isn't really new, I studied under the great Steven Speilbergo and we used these all the time.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
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.
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 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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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
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.
You must be new here...
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?"
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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