Shooting turntable shots with the eMotimo TB3

- So, we've gotten rid of the slider, and we're gonna replace it with a turntable. Why would use a turntable? - Turntables are awesome for product shots or other things that you wanna be able to rotate, and when you combine that with a motion control system, well, you can very precisely say, I want this to turn around once or twice, or three times, and how fast that goes. Now, really what distinguishes this from the slider set up that we had earlier was that we just have these plates on either end of the motor. So, we have up here our top, down here, our bottom, but it's the same power plug and we have the same control box, the TB3 there, that we can plug into.

- [Voiceover] Yeah, this is very much like the time lapse motor, but instead of turning a gear to pull the belt system... - It's goin' around and rotating. - It's just gonna gonna rotate the object. And this is great, maybe you have a lot of objects that are similar and you wanna keep getting the same move. Because this is programmable and repeatable, we can be extremely precise. So, let's get this hooked up and we'll make it work, we're gonna start by carefully moving the system over. Now, I recommend detaching the camera before you make that move, don't have anything extra on there, and we're gonna just take that off, set that aside for a second, and the thread mount on the bottom is the same as your typical tripod.

Now, you can put a plate on here and then mount it to the ball head if you want, I get it the most stable by just going right to the thread of the tripod, let's just line that up. And gently turn it, being careful not to hit any of those cables. There we go. And I just thread that on, making sure that it gets relatively securely. So, slowly spin that until it grabs and hits the bottom of the plate right about there.

- Okay. - Yup. And we've got that angled so you"ll be able to see the screen, as well. Alright, I'm gonna swap this out. Rather than using a traditional lens here, camera's powered off, we're gonna switch to a macro lens. Now, we're gonna talk more about product photography on a future episode of Video Gear Weekly, but I'm just gonna switch this out and go to a true macro lens, which is gonna work a little bit better for those close-ups on the product. Rob, why would you use a macro lens? - Well, Rich, macro lenses are perfect for product photography because they let you get really, really, really, really close up to the actual item, and when people are looking at products, especially small products, they wanna see details, and they wanna see the nuance parts of that product.

And so, you know, macro lenses are great for that purpose, but they're also great, of course, for some other things, like nature and things of that nature, taking pictures of bugs. - And you might be thinking, well, why not just use a telephoto? But, a macro is designed to get really close to the subject, which is kinda cool. Now Rob, that end just connects just like you did before when you connected the motor. - Yup, just right into here. Here we go. - [Voiceover] And take the camera control cable and connect it, that's useful if you're gonna be doing time lapse with video, not that big of a deal.

- Kay. - [Voiceover] Good. And then power. - Yup. - Now, once everything is connected, we'll power up. If I was shooting in a studio, I would normally use wall power for this, but we've got the battery handy, we power it up, I see 12 volts, it should kick on in just a second. It did, it found it. - Okay. So, we got two parts to this. We have our actual table top down here. And then we have the same control box with the same head that's gonna allow us to move and articulate the camera. - Yeah, same idea before, connect the joystick by pushing the pairing button, once it finds it, new two point move, so pretty simple here.

I'll say yup, I want a two point move, go forward. And look, now instead of moving the slider... - It's just rotating right around. - Yeah, and so why don't we frame the shot up here, we'll get this camera pointed down a little bit, and I like to get the object a bit off of the surface, so I'm just gonna set a piece of Lucite on there to raise it a little. - Yeah, and you wanna make sure, of course, if you're doing true photography or product photography, nice and clean. - We clean that. - Yeah, exactly. So, let's get our little guy up there. - But this is good for demo. Now, I'm not using this right now, so I'm just gonna hang this from the bottom hook so there's no extra movement for a second.

That's gonna minimize any vibration. Flip out my LCD so I can see what I'm doing and power up the camera. Alright, so let's move that just a little closer. And of course, normally, we would make sure that we were not seeing the crew behind us, we would frame this up but really, we're not doing the shot for real, we're doing the shot so you, following along, can learn. But, we get that kind of framed up and we'll just take advantage here of the initial auto focus, tilt up a little.

Perfect. - And the robot sounds are a plus. - Yes. Now, we've got that there, and I'm just gonna move that just so it's a little bit more centered. Sometimes, you're gonna move the object. We'll set the auto focus, not too bad. And let's change the aperture here. One of the things that's nice about a macro lens, it goes all the way up to F22 if you need that depth of field, or you can go quite shallow down to two eight, it's really up to you, but we dial that in, and let's just program it. So, now that we've got the initial shot, you wanna take the honors? - Sure.

- Alright, so go ahead and set the initial position. - Let's kind of turn it around back here so he's front and center. - [Voiceover] Yup, and we're gonna move him just a little bit more over the center of the object. There we go. Got nice shallow depth of field. Got our shot. And pretty good here. Now remember, with this lens, you do have manual focus controls if you want it, I'm using it in auto mode just to get the basics. Got a nice, tight shot. So, Rob, it says that you've got the ability, here, to move to start. So, why don't you set your starting position? - Pressing C on the control.

- Yup, good. Now, rotate it maybe two turns. Just tilt it to the side. There we go. And if you want, maybe pan the camera just a little bit, slowly. Little more. Little less. (laughing) There we go, so we sort of pinned him to the frame. - I'll press C again to accept that. - [Voiceover] Yup. Now, it gets just a little bit tricky, so let's cut in on the screen here so we can see it.

Now, the first thing we need to do is tweak the interval. So, instead of a one second interval, this is gonna be video, just roll it backwards 'til it says video. Good, now it's in video mode as opposed to time lapse mode. Now, you might be thinking, why would I use a time lapse with rotation? How 'bout seeing something like a plant grow, and doing a few slow 360s? This has got the same precise level of control as the motorized slider. So, if you wanna do something like slowly revealing over time, great for some of those indoor Winter time lapses, you can do a three day, four day type turntable move.

Just make sure that the camera and the tripod, and the controller unit all have wall power. - Right. - Alright, we got that all set there, Rob, that looks pretty good. Why don't you go ahead here, and go forward? Good, the interval's set. This is where you assign the movement duration, so right now it's a 30 second move, why don't we maybe go a little bit slower? Let's say 60 for a really slow reveal. And so, that's just dialing in that it's gonna take 60 seconds. Now, go ahead and advance.

Don't need any static time here, we're okay. And it's pretty much ready. Ramping would be if you wanna have a little bit of acceleration in or out. We'll leave that be, so it's fine. And now, it's just gonna go ahead and rewind back to start. We've got our product there, it's pretty cool. And when you click go, it's gonna start the move. So, we would just simply give it a second to settle. Alright, there's a little bit of vibration there, there often is with tight objects.

And go ahead and start it. - Hear that ramp up? - Yup. Now, you see it's slowly doing the move here, and panning. Now, in this particular case, I would normally put this on a very strong surface, making sure that there's no vibration, we've got a hollow desk here, so we're running wires underneath, you're seeing a little bit of movement on the macro shot, but it's pretty cool.

And it's doing exactly what we told it to do. And when it finished the one minute move, Rob, it's just gonna say, you wanna go again? - Yeah, and you can repeat that. So, if you needed to re-frame the object on the actual platform here, if you wanted to reprogram it, you could, or better yet, as you mentioned earlier, Rich, if I wanted to swap out a different product and have the exact same move, I could do that. - Yup, and so there, it's ramping down. - Ramping down. Yup. - Exactly like we told it to. So, it's kinda cool, this is an interesting way to use the system to precisely control the camera and the movement.

It's just one of those benefits. I was quite surprised, this system had been out for a while, and they announced the turntable, but we've actually been using this turntable system on Video Gear Weekly. You may notice some of the close up product shots that when we're showing you the equipment, you'll see the movement, so this is a cool way to add that. Alright, Rob, why don't we go ahead and we'll pull this out and just give folks some closing ideas on what to consider with the motion control system.