STAB I L I SED SUPPORTS | GEAR
permissive jurisdictions, 900MHz with three times the range). The idea appears not to be simply to avoid cabling around a vehicle mount, but to let the operator sit in comfort at a static location, even as vehicle action happens nearby. The company is keen to push the relevance of this to virus-related remote working, although with any luck, those sorts of restrictions might be a memory by the time anyone is likely to amortise the investment. Active stabilisation makes all kinds of things plausible as camera platforms, and one of them is Motion Impossible’s Agito. It’s described
style stabiliser gets, the less effective it is. The design relies on the inertia of the camera assembly and the lighter it is, the less inertia it has. The result is something that’s twitchier, but faster. It’s easier to carry all day, perhaps, but it doesn’t demand any less training or experience. GIMBALS It’s perhaps a little reductive to refer to Arri’s stabilised remote heads as gimbals. Even though in essence they provide the same three axes of stabilisation, the build is more like a conventional remote head with a roll axis – and a huge 30kg payload. As such, the SRH-3 immediately became popular in both conventional remote head scenarios and as a stabilising addition to vehicle mounts, among many other things. The new SRH-360 adds beefier motors to the pan axis and also a new assembly, permitting continuous rotation in pan that can upgrade existing SRH-3s. It’s a modular system, and it boasts newly developed radio modules that allow it to provide both head and lens control over a kilometre at 2.4GHz (or, in more “IT’S EASIER TO CARRY ALL DAY, BUT DOESN’T DEMAND LESS EXPERIENCE”
there have been at least five or six principal series of designs from the name that started it all. The latest Steadicam incarnation, the Volt System, handles cameras up to 22kg and boasts a set of servos that null out acceleration and deceleration forces to keep things level when cornering, starting or stopping. They also let operators dial in a degree of tilt that’s automatically maintained. Tilting a traditional Steadicam design requires constant pressure, which an experienced operator is able to handle, but this inevitably risks adding instability. Gimbals differ from Steadicam in that they stabilise only in the direction a camera is pointing; they don’t stabilise where a camera is. It turns out most of the value of stabilisers is in the stabilisation of the frame, which is why optical stabilisation in stills cameras works so well and why gimbals and handheld Steadicams work at all. There are shots that need stable position, though. It’s common for tracking moves to include foreground elements that are closer to the camera than the subject, encoding parallax information about the three-dimensionality of the scene in a two-dimensional moving image, but those foreground objects might appear to dance around distractingly against the background if position isn’t smoothed out, too. There is also an argument that the smaller and lighter a Steadicam-
TOP LEFT DOP Steven Holleran with Easy Rig’s hero product, the Cinema 3
THERE’S NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO MAKE GOOD USE
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FEBRUARY 202 1 | DEF I N I T ION 17
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