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Ars Technica Builds Make Magazine's Steadicam
An anonymous reader writes "Make magazine has been out for a little over a month now and was given high marks in a Slashdot review. Ars Technica has taken their review one step further by building the $14 steadicam project and testing it out. (be sure to check out the QuickTime video at the end to see their results...)"
So why would you go to the trouble?
Because there are many thousands of us who shoot video on a level between "dad in the backyard with the kids" and "Oscar nominee" who might want some improvement in our quality?
I appreciate the effort, but a test video with no subject to focus attention on doesn't really show off how well any of the four tests are working. All I see are tarred cracks in the pavement jiggling in all four.
Whereas, had they walked with someone down the street, it would have shown off the differences quite well.
Jory
It's just a little Physics, not magic: from Johnny Chung Lee's website (and also in the magazine):
How you use it is 80% of the smoothness. This even is true for the professional stuff with all the fancy shocks and hydraulics. Don't expect this thing to perform miracles, you have to practice using your arms and body to create a smooth motion. Watch your hands while you walk, and see how level you can keep them relative to the ground. Watching the shadow of your hands on a sunny say is an easy way to isolate thier movement. Keep your legs bent and learn how to "glide". I talked with someone who has used professional steady-cams and they said this was, "really, just as good." Getting good results is not so much about the equipment, but how you use it. That's really true about everything.
Sola Deo Gloria!
I was a bit disappointed to see the article, actually -- when a "cool" new print mag recycles the Internet, you know the end of paper is nigh.
Yeah, but in 15 years, my kids can flip through my old issues of Make and find fun projects.. while that dude's site is going to be long gone.
The internet is great, but far too many sites are gone forever.
Professional steadicam operators use equipment that is completely different from consumer/prosumer 'steadicam'-ish gear. They come in teams of two: The one carrying the rig isn't able to look through a viewfinder, so a second person has to control focus, aperture etc. The apparatus has so much inertia that the carrier can actually hop up and down and the camera will still hardly move, let alone rotate. Lots of practice is only half of the story: the huge weight strapped to the body kind of forces the operator to move smoothly, anything else would be totally exhausting.
Equipment in the two figure dollar range, on the other hand, isn't more than a handheld tripod that keeps the centre of gravity around your hands by introducing a counter-weight that roughly equals the weight of your camera. With consumer cameras becoming ever smaller and lighter, that isn't much. Jerks introduced by shaky hands are pretty much all they can compensate for somewhat adequately.
However, this isn't what ars technica actually tested: They walked down a street. The picture resulting from this has to be shaky hand cam style. The "little bit of shake" that the reviewer attested is actually insanely wild. If you haven't got a more expensive steadicam setup, you really only have these two options: Either purposely go for the blair witch style, or let only the actor walk (when shown in the picture, as opposed to the 1st person view) and put the camra person plus camera on some sort of wheeled vehicle, like a dolly with a tripod.
It seems like the ars techinca reviewers had too much fun doing their oh-so-cool project; not only were they too enthusiastic about the marginal improvement in image quality, they also didn't really factor in the problems they had (they needed much longer than the make mag instructions projected and ran into issues the instructions didn't even touch on) when writing the concluding summary.
Not that there's anything bad about this: With a USD 14 handheld tripod, you're supposed to have fun, not emulate Oscar-league steadicam gear. And yes you can train to move super-smooth, but still steadicam and steady camcorder are two entirely different issues.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.