Best 3 Camera Stabilizers for Red Epic

[Todd Terry]

Haven’t seen it with my own eyes, but there are also the gimbals from CAME-TV, which (as far as I know) seem to be by far the most budget-conscious offerings of all the MōVI-style rigs.

Their smallest DSLR sized rig is less than a grand… up to about $1900 for the biggest.

Honestly I haven’t used any of these really, yet (if you don’t count just running around the studio with one just for fun)… but have a friend with a Ronin and he has found it quite problematic.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Emre Tufekcioglu]

Hi Todd,

This is a fake posting. “Dennis Rodman” is one of the fake names he uses to post multiple reviews about his company. He creates multiple accounts with different names and writes fake response/back and forth exchanges with himself praising his companies products. He is all over the net.

[Todd Terry]

Yeah assumed it was some kind of obvious trolling… the real Dennis Rodman is far too busy hunting and fishing with Kim Jong Un to bother with this. Plus it was one of those “posts without any reason to be posting.”

Nonetheless I did want to mention the CAME-TV stabilizer, I wonder if anyone has actually used it.

I find this whole stabilizer revolution pretty wild. It’s a bit funny that Steadicam had the market so monopolized for so long and it took about 20 years for the first one-tenth-the-price clones of Garrett’s original invention to appear. With the MōVI, it took about 20 minutes.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Emre Tufekcioglu]

We have a Movi but at this current time it is no steadicam replacement. I cant fly my Alexa Classic on a movi but can probably fly the new Alexa mini. Not buying that just yet 🙂

[Todd Terry]

Yeah I definitely don’t see the Steadicam and the Movi as interchangeable or replacements for each other. Both good tools, but one’s a wrench and one’s a screwdriver.

All that being said, I really don’t do many stabilized shots anymore. I used to do a lot, but just kinda got out of the habit. I can’t even remember the last time the Steadicam case was cracked open. Wait… yes I do, and I was shooting film with it, so that’s been at least 4 years. Sad.

I do sort of go through these phases of what I like, whether it be framing, camera moves, lighting, whatever. I was looking up some very old footage recently and realized “Ahhh… that was during my ‘Dutch Angle Phase’ that lasted a while.”

What goes around, comes around.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Rick Wise]

Ah yes, Todd, the Dutch-angle phase. I too had one and loved it for a short while. Of course, I over used it and it started to leave a bad taste when I did it, so I stopped. But it sure does have a place in story telling when done at just the right place and time. A little does go a long way.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
MFA/BFA Lighting and Camera Instructor Academy of Art University
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Todd Terry]

Yeah I was crazy with them for a while. When I was shooting a lot of 35mm I used to have the colorist telecine the footage all straight… then do another pass with all the footage canted a bit right, then another canted left. Voilà!… instant full-resolution Dutch angles, which you really couldn’t do in post back in the standard-def days without losing too much res. Easier now in HD or 4K.

There’s another cinematographer in our area of the country (who used to be a COW regular, though I haven’t seen him in a while) who was even more extreme about it than me. I swear he shot almost nothing but dutch angles… and extreme ones, I bet some were almost 45°. I really learned that when a client give me some footage he had shot for them to use on another project. It was impossible to intercut with my new boring-straight-and-level stuff.

Right now I’m in my “arcing dolly” phase, which I use a lot for talking heads, etc. We had a slider company make us a curved one to our specs with exactly the same radius as Matthews curved track, so I can do short dolly arcs infinitely easier/faster than laying real track. I probably use it too much.

We’ll see what I get obsessed with next…..

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com