A total investment of $4.49 prevented me from having to return some really cool video equipment that I had just purchased. Let me tell you what happened.
I was on vacation with my family in St. Maarten. Having the choice of either picking shells with my wife or shooting videos, I choose shooting videos on the beach. But I didn’t have my tripod, my Canon DSLR, or my wireless lavaliere microphone. I only had my iPhone and an external microphone that plugged into my iPhone. So, I started experimenting.
I’d prop up my phone against a wall, that wasn’t very good since my phone kept slipping down. I’d hold the phone in my hand for a few minutes while standing still. Try holding it steady and watch what happens. There’s nothing like shaky video to induce nausea with your viewer.
Then I tried walking with the phone in my hand while shooting. Again, it created shaky video and my hand was getting tired after a few minutes. Over the course of a few days, I created 50 videos. Each video ranged from 3 to 7 minutes in length. I learned that holding the phone vertically was easier to hold but the horizontal videos looked better. When I played these videos back, I concluded that they were not the best videos I’d done. They were less than ideal.
I started to look for a device that could stabilize my mobile videos, something that would smooth out the shaking. I knew there were devices called gimbals but didn’t really know how they worked or what would be involved in using one. What did I do to learn about this device? Simple. I went on YouTube and typed in a question. The responses were exactly what I was looking for. There were many choices of video stabilizers. I watched the reviews. I learned how they worked. I learned about the pros and cons of various models.
Here’s how it works…
You put your phone in a cradle that’s connected to what looks like a beefed up selfie stick. The cradle holding your phone rotates on three axes, left-right, up-down, and forward-backward. This device has two separate motors that help keep your phone aligned in the same position, no matter what’s going on with your hand holding the device. I figured it was time to buy one to see if I could make my cell phone videos look better. With tax, it cost me $150. I was excited to test it out since I was going on vacation with my wife a few days later.
You should know that before using the video stabilizer, you must calibrate it so that your phone is perfectly balanced before turning on the device. Otherwise, you’ll burn out the motors. This was frustrating. I couldn’t get it right. It took 30 minutes to almost get it right, so, decided to hold off till vacation to see if I could do it.
A few days later I’m in Florida with my wife and guess what? She wants to go pick shells. She ‘asks’ me to accompany her. She knows I enjoy walking the beach. I gather my video gear for this excursion. I take my iPhone X, my plug-in microphone with windscreen and my brand-new video stabilizer gimbal.
While on the beach trying to stabilize the phone and the device, I couldn’t get it balanced to sit in a neutral position. It kept flopping to one side no matter what I did.
Then, the motors on my gimbal conked out and the device automatically shut off. The motors had overheated trying to straighten out my phone and shut down. Not only that, but the battery on my phone drained to 10%.
After lunch, I went back on YouTube to see what I was doing wrong. I found the answer after watching 30 minutes of video stabilizer videos.
First, I had left my phone case on. That made the phone heavier and the gimbal was not designed to hold phones with cases. Second, I had attached an external microphone to my lighting port. That made it even heavier. Third, there’s an adjustable arm to counterbalance additional weight from larger phones. I hadn’t seen that before. Even after taking off my case and setting the counterbalance correctly, my phone was still too big and heavy for this video stabilizer. One YouTuber had found the perfect solution. He grabbed his wife’s glass makeup product that had some heft to it. He got some crazy glue and glued it to the end of the gimbal to balance his phone. It was a jerry-rigged solution, but it worked.
Next Month, I will share my jerry-rigged solution and if it worked…
Till next time, see you on video!
