GEAR | DRONE ALTERNAT I VES
an 85-foot reach – is perhaps the world’s best-qualified replacement for a flying machine. It goes very high, makes no noise, and aviation authorities remain uninvolved.
FREEDOM TO ROAM Cinemoves isn’t the only
organisation to add a fourth axis to a gimbal. Opertec’s front page shows us the Milli and Magna gyrostabilised active heads, with the latter incorporating that fourth axis. Thanks to that, cranes no longer need to worry about keeping the gimbal mount roughly level, which is a big time-saver. Perhaps the greatest freedom comes from the company’s cable-suspended camera platform, the 3D Active Cam. This can put the lens anywhere within an area 150m across. Since the system is capable of flying the camera at a mildly shocking ten metres a second, it’s perhaps no great surprise that each of the five winches consumes up to 10kW. The company offers a huge range of things upon which to hang that head, including more or less every variety of every common piece of grip equipment. There’s
mission, to any conventional gimbal when the operator tries to direct the camera straight down. At this point, two of the rotating axes of the gimbal align, and it’s incapable of moving in one of the directions it needs to in order to keep the camera on an even keel – at least until someone nudges something and the axes separate again. Adding a fourth axis allows the gimbal to intelligently point the camera in any direction. That’s a good thing in the context of non- drone camera positioning, because Cinemoves also holds a Guinness World Record for the famously looming Akela crane, which – with
IMAGES The Cinemoves Matrix gimbal (below) works across four axes to avoid dreaded gimbal lock from affecting footage; JL Fisher (below right) can always go the extra mile
dollies, sectional cranes and telescopic camera cranes, for those who like moves that go in a straight line and aren’t constrained to points on the surface of a sphere. In the context of telescoping cranes, there’s one name we can’t ignore. Keeping in mind a drone’s ability to go high in the
38 DEF I N I T ION | JULY 202 1
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