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HIGHSTEP | Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera on Filmpower Nebula 4000 Lite Stabilizer

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HIGHSTEP is an encounter on the beach with rock climbers honing their craft and hanging out with friends. I was home for the holidays in Orange County, off to the tidal basin at Corona del Mar with my nephew to try out the new Filmpower Nebula 4000 Lite 3-axis brushless motorized gimbal stabilizer. Always on the lookout for character subjects, I ran into these climbers, and their friendly enthusiasm was the real thing. This video owes completely to their casual kindness: it was serendipitous to meet them, and to come up with this unplanned film within an hour on December 22, 2014.

No less, I caught some beautiful light flares from the setting sun that you just can’t stage. And I thought the stabilizer brought a revolutionary new capability to this sort of simplified backpack shoot, for total elegance of movement equivalent to large-scale productions that require hours of setup time with dolly tracks and jibs. That’s the essence of this small camera revolution: it’s been only a year since we got 10-bit 4:2:2 RAW capture in a film log color space at such a tiny profile in the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera (BMPCC). It’s the perfect match for the Nebula 4000: flying past online nerd fights (you wouldn’t believe) over firmware tuning and PID settings, it’s buttery smooth right out of the flight case after just a few minutes of physical balancing. I could have pushed the weight limits, mounting a Panasonic GH4, but then would have needed to hook up a heavy Atomos Shogun for capturing video quality equivalent to the BMPCC, defeating the purpose of the Nebula 4000’s miniature freedom of movement.

I am grateful to Moby for permission to use his cerebral tune “Look Back In,” while Silent Partner rounds things out with their aggressive “Armadillo.” Thanks to my nephew Aaron Richter for assisting on camera and pulling together the music. Thanks also to Filmpower for creating the Nebula 4000 Lite. And mostly, thanks to the climbers in this film for their inspiration.

For a quick look behind-the-scenes from this shoot, here’s the photo album from Flickr:

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Moonicam: When a Snorricam Says No to GoPro

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Although you can mount a GoPro on a helmet and turn it around to point at your face, the video quality on a GoPro is inadequate for anything serious. Not that this is serious.

But I just worked on a shoot that needed to play game at multiplexes, and big screens need clarity. What you’ll see in this video is a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera and Rokinon 7.5mm prime lens (while my surrounding how-to is shot on a Panasonic GH4). The articulating arm that I mention is a Kamerar 11-inch Tough Friction Arm. It stays out of the frame, but there’s no getting rid of the helmet without aiming the camera severely downward. So, point: SnorriCam, though it wasn’t a problem for this skateboarding shoot with helmets anyway.

I was surprised by the image stabilization of my own head, without having the benefit of any gimbal or active lens (and without me being some kind of half-fowl mutation, thinking of that viral clip shown here of SmarterEveryDay’s “chicken-powered steadicam”). To get the shots I was brought in for, I got tempted to go down the SnorriCam route that starts off this video; but my scene didn’t call for stability that’s locked onto the torso – instead, the head. I’m pretty stoked at how the gizmo worked out. Yet this commentary ends with a reflection on how Hollywood is a helluva lot different from indie filmmaking, and I’ll be writing more about that later at the blog.

Big thanks to the friendly experts at the under-wraps studio production, especially Julio Macat, A.S.C., Max Macat and Jeremy Hays. And of course, Dad. Music is “A Freak” by Moby, licensed via mobygratis.com.

[NOTE: If you make one of these, proceed carefully, at your own risk. You are responsible for taking extra precautions on account of the additional mass created by any head-mounted rig.]

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DOG PARK | Testing Out the Big Balance Gibbon 2-axis gimbal stabilizing a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera (with Adobe Warp)

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Big Balance are heading to market with their Gibbon, a 2-axis gimbal stabilizer for small cameras, and I figured that this neighborhood dog park would be a fun place to test it out. We’re all looking for that killer app, combining discreet size (much smaller than a Movi), with effortless smooth action. We’re still waiting, because that 3rd axis is crucial: up-down + tilt stabilization (2-axis) isn’t enough to get good shots, so really, adding left-to-right (3-axis) is the final frontier. Smartphone and GoPro 3-axis gimbals this small have hit the market, but nothing yet for camera weights in this ballpark: at 440 grams, I used a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera for this video with a Panasonic 14mm f/2.5 lens stopped down for wide depth of field.

Any device that keeps the camera level to the horizon and looking straight ahead is useful, though. For this Big Balance Gibbon, I applied Adobe Warp Stabilizer in Premiere Pro afterward to account for that lack of a 3rd axis, setting its smoothness to a nominal 1%. It requires extra processing time, but for now, it’ll do.

“The Creek” music is by Topher Mohr and Alex Elena, from the royalty-free YouTube Sound Library.

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