Gimbal Tips for Improved Videos
You’ve been using a gimbal for video for a while now and you may be wondering how to get smooth video, or smoother video, with your current videography gear.
Here are a few gimbal tips as well as some general videography tips to help you get what you want out of your new gimbal.
Walk Smoother
One of the more important gimbal tips is to realize just how much a gimbal can help with stabilization and what limitations there are for gimbals.
One of the biggest things for a new gimbal user to appreciate is that a gimbal does not eliminate all camera movement. I know! I had the same problem, and still get that way sometimes. The absolute first thing to learn with gimbal tips is to try to walk or move more smoothly.
I like to imagine it this way: If I didn’t have a gimbal, how steady and smooth would I try to be? Then, I keep that same level of smoothness as I move with my camera rig on a gimbal.
In other words, I walk without any up and down movement, I stay as level as I can, and I keep all of my personal movements steady, deliberate, and slow. Especially that up and down walking motion. On playback, even with the gimbal smoothness, it can give the viewer the impression of floating on the ocean with all the swells lifting us up and down.
So, without the gimbal, practice all of your freehand videography movements, get them as smooth as possible. Then. adding the gimbal for video will smooth it all out even further, resulting in a virtually seamless and unnoticeable level of dampened camera movement.
Balance the Gimbal
While the gimbal is an awesome piece of videography gear, it still requires some input from us to get the best results from it. It has to be set up for the specific weight and shape of our videography gear.
Many gimbals do this with counterweights, an electronic balancing, sliding the center of gravity, or a combination of all of that.
As an example, take a look at the configuration of the gimbals I like to recommend, the E-Image Horizon Pro from Ikan. Part of the balancing tool is shown above, the slider mechanism which allows you to set up the gimbal for the optical center of the rig which may not exactly correspond to the center of gravity of the rig, both of which are important.
So, you also use the electronics, (the built-in microprocessor pictures above), in addition to the mechanical settings. It won’t be as full-featured as a multi-thousand dollar SteadiCam, but it does an amazing job, especially when considering how budget-friendly Ikan videography gear always is.
All of this setting up your rig would normally be done before you start your first gimbal video project. Make a mental note too, whenever you change camera or lens, you will have to repeat these steps to balance the rig for the changed centers. It might help to make a note of what the physical marks are for each configuration and let the E-Image Horizon Pro electronics save the other settings.
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Keep Your Other Videography Gear
We get lost sometimes in all of our gimbal tips and learning, that we still have and need our other videography gear. Go ahead and plan out a video shoot using only the gimbal and all of the features of the gimbal, that’s the best way to get used to it, learn how to get smooth video using only the gimbal.
After that, put it in your regular rotation of gear to use when you write out your storyboard. Having a gimbal is awesome for the versatility and freedom it allows for certain types of video shots. It becomes part of our gear set, not an all-in-one replacement for all of our other tripod and shooting accessories.
We still need our fluid head, our dollies, our sliders, our teleprompters, our jibs, our camera cages, our external monitors, our follow focus system, our boom mics, and our DMX lighting in order to capture the shots we planned out while storyboarding our script or shooting outline.
Practice a Lot
You could say this goes without saying, but we do have to say it, because we can easily get distracted by everything we do as videographers, lighting specialists (aka: cinematographers), scriptwriters, audio engineers, set designers, actors, editors, directors, and executive producers.
Most of us are either one-man operations or maybe a small crew of 2 to 5 people, so we end up taking care of multiple roles. Have fun practicing these gimbal tips and then use them with your other videography gear and your fine skills and abilities to get smooth video.
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