From the course: Video Production and Post Tips

The benefits of stabilization

From the course: Video Production and Post Tips

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The benefits of stabilization

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- Hey there, I'm Robbie Carman. - And I'm Rich Harrington. - And Rich, this week we're talking about a very popular subject, these days in the production world, and that is stabilization. - Yeah, it turns out that people want shots that move. Now, in the old days we, of course, could move a camera lots of different ways, beyond hand-helding the camera, you can walk with a camera, but it gets bouncy. But we've now seen cameras get lighter and lighter. Now, some of the traditional things that have been used for a long time include things like track and dolly, putting the camera on wheels and sliding it to where you want to go, but what's the problem with tracks? - [Robbie] Well, they're hard to build, they're big, they have to take time to set up and get configured properly. - [Rich] And they only go one direction. - [Robbie] And they only go one or two directions, right. The other thing is, of course there's been low-fi methods of stabilization for years, you know, pinching your arms close to your body when you're holding the camera, or putting it to rest on a ledge, or a pillow, or something like that. One of the developments that's happened over the past couple years is that technology has a trickle-down effect. What we used to find in high-end kind of aerial cameras, gyroscopic set-ups, and things of that nature, some of that technology is trickling down to where now, with handheld rigs, we have things like three-axis gimbals and other technology like that that we can use on full-size cameras, cell phones, and even cameras that are specifically built with purposes of being in a gimbal. - I was first exposed to gyroscopic stabilization about a decade ago. We were doing some helicopter shots, and it was very normal, on a helicopter, to have a gyroscope to help stabilize the camera, and deal with some of the vibration and the movement, to dampen it. And then that technology was adapted and we were actually shooting out of a moving truck, shooting a bunch of bicyclists at a road race, and the camera operator had this loud, whirring gyroscopic thing on the back of the camera that would balance it and keep it from moving around, but it got in the way of sound, it was heavy, you would get tired. - [Robbie] Yeah, and then we've all seen, on the sidelines of a football game or other sporting event, we've all seen the steady-cam operator with the big vest on and the big rig and the monitor. But steady-cam operators are artists themselves, very difficult to kinda understand how to balance those systems out, how to shoot with them, it takes a lot of training, you have to have the physique to be able to do it for quite a while. And so Rich, the thing about stabilization, when it comes down to it, it's all about getting smooth shots. You hit the nail on the head earlier when you said, "We like to put the camera into motion." Imagine being in the middle of a basketball game, like on the court behind us, and you wanna get that motion of what it feels like to be a player. Well if you're hand-holding a phone, or a small camera or something like that, you're gonna get the shake and the moving around and that distracts people and, at worst, kinda makes them seasick. - Yeah, and if you're following a moving subject, like some runners that are training and exercising or warming up, well, if you're on a locked down tripod shot, voom, they pass the camera in half a second and you can't tell the story, or they get really small in the frame. These days, we like to favor the action. Video is growing into a medium of lots of close-ups. Part of that's due to the smaller screen size, but it's becoming more and more important to fill the frame and to follow the action. Plus, let's just face it, the visual sophistication of movies, and even video games, where you have photo-realistic, fake computer-generated camera moves, people have expected cinematography to really up its game. - Yeah, I think that's true, and these newer devices and the way that they're being able to be stabilized from larger rigs like DJI Ronin to this one, this is the DJI Osmo, which we'll talk about, even to iPhone rigs, allow content creators and storytellers to get the types of shots that previously they could only dream about. Again, think about, you know, getting a nice stabilized shot hanging out the side of a car, looking down at a wheel. That used to cost thousands and thousands of dollars of specialized rigs to secure to the car and balance it out and stabilize it, now you can get a shot like that, little handheld rig like this, pretty easily. - Yep, so this week we're gonna look at three different solutions that range in price point, from things that are big enough and robust enough to handle sort of the mid-size pro camera to a cool new unit from DJI to something that'll work with a GoPro or an iPhone. There's a solution for any budget.

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