Using a gimbal with an SLR

- One of the great things about the videos in our library is the incredible production value. Behind the camera right now is Jacob Cunningham, who's been the director on all of my videos, and he's amazing with a handheld camera. You might be thinking, "Wow, actually, this footage "I'm seeing right now is really amazing, he's so smooth, "in fact, he's smooth even as that guy's movin' around, "even as he's gettin' really weird, the camera "is staying smooth," now, some of that is to Jacob's credit, but I would say more of it, sorry, Jacob, in this case, is due to the fact that he's using a handheld gimbal that's beefy enough to support a mirrorless camera or an SLR, but still provides a full, I can't lose him, I'm tryin' to shake him, still provides a full, Steadicam-like environment, which allows you to get these incredibly smooth tracking shots with a piece of equipment that's cheaper than has ever been possible before.

This is the Beholder DS1 3-axis gimbal, I currently have mounted on it a Fuji X-T2 mirrorless camera. Gimbals are ranked and categorized by the amount of weight they can bear, just like a tripod, and this gimbal can hold a decent-sized camera, I can't remember, around three and a half to four pounds, I think, that's enough to hold a mirrorless camera, or a smaller SLR, like a Rebel, or a 1000 series Nikon. Depending on what lens you put on it, you may have more or less trouble getting your particular camera to work on this rig, however, Beholder sells other gimbals at larger and smaller sizes, you can probably find one to fit whatever SLR or mirrorless camera you have.

I'm going to turn it on now so you can see it in action. This is with the camera mounted on it, the gimbal's not actually doing anything, and already you can see that it, it kind of hangs there, but as I move it around, the camera's not being stabilized. If I power it up... (beeping) It makes that noise, and the camera just leveled off. Now, what's cool is, no matter how I move it around, the bottom of the camera stays parallel to the floor, and the camera does not tilt forward or back.

I can go up and down, left and right, everything that you saw Jacob doing earlier, all that smoothness was coming from the gimbal. What's really nice about the way this is designed is that when it comes time to do a camera movement, I can kind of lead the camera, so I'm going to tilt the gimbal's handle to the left, and after a moment, the camera follows, same thing going to the right. If I want to tilt down, I tilt it down, and the camera follows. The reason for that lag is that when I'm moving around, it allows me, it's difficult to explain, but it allows me to kind of lead the camera into the movement that I want and lead it back out of the movement.

I can do these very nice smooth eases and, eases in and eases out, it takes a little practice, but after a while, I've found that I can do pretty sophisticated, very smooth movements around kind of very particular choreography. I also have a little joystick on the camera, and this varies from gimbal model to gimbal model. If I move the joystick to the left or right, I can actually just pan or tilt, so when I'm just standing still, I can actually refine my shot here without having to trick the camera into moving.

So I'm really impressed with this setup, now, the gimbal has several different modes, I can turn off the kind of auto tracking thing so that I can only drive it with the gimbal, but this is the default mechanism, and I really feel like it's the best way to do it, with practice, as I said, you can do very sophisticated camera movements. Now, if you go online and look up this gimbal, you might find some people complaining about the setup. So I'm going to turn this off. And with the gimbal off, notice that the camera is still balanced along this axis and it's balanced this way, it's sitting pretty much where I would want it.

That's because I spend a good amount of time getting it properly positioned. If you look on the gimbal, you'll see all of these little gold knobs, there's two here, there's one here, there are two back here, there are two right here. These allow you to balance the camera. I'll just throw it out of whack here on one axis. I'm going to loosen these. I never can remember which way is loose. I mean, I know, you know, righty tighty, lefty loosey, but it's hard to know what that's relative to. So, there we go, if I loosen some of these up, and move the camera, I can throw the balance out of whack, so before you can do anything with this gimbal, you've got to get your camera on it, and you've got to get it balanced into that position that I was showing you.

So, this is not balanced. Where I had it before was, however, where I had it before was balanced for this lens, at this focal length. If I extend the lens too far, it'll go out of whack. If I open up the LCD screen, it'll go out of whack, so you've really got to get it all set up for the way you want. Now, as I said, if you go look at some reviews, you'll see people saying, "Ugh, it's too hard to get "it set up, this is unusable, I had to return it." Those people weren't patient enough, it doesn't take that much practice to figure out how to quickly get the camera on here and get it usable.

What's more, if you're always using the same camera and the same lens, most of the axes are going to stay the same from usage to usage, the only thing you're going to have to do is adjust this. This is easy enough to get going that I recently used it on a trip in Africa and was getting the camera onto the gimbal while in a bouncy land rover driving through the Bush, I was able to get this set up, so I would say don't believe complaints that this is too difficult to get configured. Also, Beholder has some nice YouTube videos online that walk you through the entire process.

What's great about this setup over something like an Osmo, or some of the little action cameras that have gimbals is that I've got a Fuji X-T2 on here. This is a 4K camera with an APS-C sized sensor and interchangeable lenses, I can get extremely good video quality out of this, so I'm not having to compromise the video quality that I get out of my SLR or my mirrorless camera if I want this kind of, if I want a gimbal, so again, it's shocking that this technology is down to the point where I can buy something that will stabilize my camera this well for somewhere between 500 and 750 dollars.

Your price is going to vary depending on which gimbal you need, and it's also going to vary because this gimbal seems to be branded under a couple of different names, if you go to Amazon, you're going to see it listed under Ikan, I-K-A-N, you're also going to see it listed under Beholder, the prices vary from one to the other. I don't know if that's just because they've packaged it in different ways at different times and changed the price or what, but shop around a little bit and you should find this down as low as 550 bucks, at least at the time of this shooting. Personally, I think that's a steal for what a good job this does of stabilizing.

Another cool thing about this is I can flip this around so that the camera can be held down low. It will hang from the gimbal, that allows me to do these cool shots down low to the ground, shooting animals, shooting people's feet while they're walking, or just generally getting a different vantage point. Sometimes even when I'm working up high, I prefer to have the camera hanging low, depending on the type of movement that I'm going to do. It's easier for me to walk really fast or even run with it hanging down, rather than trying to hold it up, so that's another configuration that you can use that buys you a little more flexibility.

As with any piece of gear, this is going to take practice, you're going to get better at it the more you use it, but I think you will find that, for this 550 dollars, you're getting, in some cases, a replacement for a jib or a slider or a crane or any number of other pieces of gear, in this case, I'm just replacing Jacob. No, I could never replace Jacob, it's not that good, but still, it's really amazing for the price, if you do any video work at all, particularly any video work involving a lot of camera movements, you should definitely look into some kind of motorized 3-axis gimbal for your camera.