I’ve got a new scooter shop in my neighborhood, and figured it could be a visually fun place to start experimenting with my new CAME-Single 3-axis gimbal stabilizer that just arrived. A more thorough review of the product is forthcoming, but in the meantime, here are some notes on this shoot.
Apart from the standard practice of closing up apertures for wide depth of field where you just can’t manage pulling focus while flying on a gimbal, I’ve always wanted to try out steadicam style in shallow focus, using a bright prime lens. But that presents a few problems: it only makes sense to shoot ultra-wide on a gimbal, and those lenses aren’t typically bright, especially with a high crop factor like you get with the Panasonic GH4. Anything capable of shallow focus at wide focal lengths has got to be huge, and the king of them all is Voigtländer’s new 10.5mm f/0.95 lens, weighing in at 568 grams. Hooked onto the GH4 and then stacking a requisite ND filter, it’s well past the CAME-Single’s 1 kilogram weight limit. So, these results probably look worse than the normal stabilizer capability of the CAME-Single (to be confirmed soon), and I have to admit, I applied Adobe Warp onto a clip or two where things got really bad. But I was surprised that the CAME-Single didn’t freak out, and it generally did the job.
You must agree, it’s a cool look! Having that buttery bokeh while smoothly flying around like this is a really unique aesthetic. It only works when you’re keeping an equal distance to everything, as seen here starting a half-minute in. But if I wanted (or only could manage) long depth of field, I would be better off using my Olympus 9-18mm f/4 lens that’s truly miniature and wouldn’t stress the motors (but performs great). I’ll test the CAME-Single with that lens going forward, in a stabilizer round-up that includes the CAME 7800, Nebula 4000 Lite, Cinevate Morpheus, Big Balance Gibbon, and Steadicam Merlin.
Thanks to Jamie at La Moto Washington for letting me roam around. He’s running the best shop in the mid-Atlantic region for scooters and motorcycles.
Note that you can play the video back in 4K-UHD, on a capable monitor, by enlarging it to full-screen. If that doesn’t seem to work, it’s also posted at YouTube where you can hit up the gear icon at bottom-right there to select 2160p resolution. Thanks for watching!
I’m trying something similar in weight with my CAME Single. I’m using it with a G7 with a Metabones Speedbooster and a Sigma 10-20 3.5. I think it works out to be the same weight as your setup even with the Speedbooster as the G7 is a much lighter camera with a much lighter battery. The lens though, it’s ridiculously heavy for the poor thing. I can get it sit level but not much in terms of balancing. Any where I place it, it just swings back to the center – doesn’t stay in position at all (this setup is stupidly front heavy as you can imagine). Usually fly with a 20mm pancake and the G7, which, funnily enough, is too light for it! The motors strain at extreme angles with the pancake but not with the ginormous SB+Sigma setup. Getting very usable footage with the 10-20 (a little bit of warping is required) but, the wobble is real. I noticed you had some too. How have you set it up on the gimbal? As in, I’m guessing you’ve got most settings pushed to the extreme. Do you have it sitting as low as possible in the pitch axis? I’m sure we should be able to squeeze some extra power from the motors by fiddling around with the PID but the warning letter that came with my CAME (….) has me all paranoid. Might ask CAME-TV to assist me on this. It can clearly handle well above the recommended payload.