Build Your Own Steadicam

John Jorsett writes "Always wanted to film one of those cool 'walking' sequences, where the camera stays rock-steady as you trudge along? Well, so did Johnny Chung Lee, except he didn't want to lay out major cash for a professional Steadicam rig, so he built his own for $14. He further claims you can do it in about 20 minutes if you know what you're doing. What more could a cheap, impatient Spielberg wannabe ask for?"

I don't know...

How about talent?

Re:I don't know...

Well, it's not like Spielberg himself has all that much...

Does what it says it does

I stumbled upon this site about a year ago and, being an ametur filmmaker, decided to give it a try. The parts were cheap and it really was quite easy to put together. But don't expect it to be perfect. It takes a little while to get the feel of it, and even then you won't be getting perfectly steady shots while running quickly. But for the price, it's tough to beat.

Re:Does what it says it does

You raise a good point, but I will have to repectfully disagree with you. In-camera image stabilization corrects small jitters, like the natural motion of your hand when you are trying to hold the camera steady. This device eliminates the small shakes, so you could concievably use this as a replacement for image stabilization. When you are running while holding a camera, the shakes are much larger than even the most advanced camera stabilization can account for. This type of steadycam can eliminate a good portion of this motion, but in my experience image stabilization does not have the capability to correct the rest.

Re:Does what it says it does

I saw it over 2 years ago and ran away from it screaming... it is WAY too heavy for real work.

the best solution I have ever seen was a monopod modified to have a plastic coated weight at the bottom, it collapses into something that can be carried and is much easier to control plus costs less and weighs less.

although it is still NOTHING like a real steadicam.. wearing that vest with the spring arm and rest of the gear coupled with a REAL 5 inch LCD monitor mounted on the weight plate... a trained operater can almost run at full speed without motion in the camera... the home brew units can not do anytihng like that.

Plus I find the vest unit to be more comfortable and can shoot for much longer... having your body support the weight compared to the home built that requires your arms to support everything is significant!

Re:Does what it says it does

as the director and DP of a filimg group I do beleive in suffering for my art. the Suffering though is done by my crew and the actors.

Oh I'll make them suffer alright....

Tourist...

YEAY!...Now I can look even stupider when I visit other places and take meaningless film I'll never watch again.

Pretty cool stuff

The videos are pretty interesting. Sony should make a commercial version of this, if they can make it for $14. Isn't it amazing how much cooler things sound with a soundtrack.

Re:Pretty cool stuff

Except that shipping anything with such and odd shape with a dead-weight attached is going to be more expensive to ship than $14.

Re:Pretty cool stuff

Steadycam does: the Steadycam Jr. [smsprod.com] It even has an external LCD monitor.

Re:Pretty cool stuff

explain how this isn't a tripod on wheels with a weight attached?

Simple: It's not a tripod, and it has no wheels.

At best, you could call it a monopod, but even then, it's meant to be carried, it doesn't rest on the ground. So I guess it's a nonopod.

What it really is is a stick with a weight attached. The weight steadies the camera from sudden jerks, simply due to it's own inertia. It still relies on the camera guy to have a fairly steady hand, this just "takes the edge off" of the shakiness, so to speak.

the story's better at memepool.

more links and such.

memepool [memepool.com]

Re:the story's better at memepool.

There you can't post and complain about incomplete coverage. But the link to a site [homebuiltstabilizers.com] about home made stabilizers should have been mentioned.

stedicam+phone

These are cheap enough to use with a picture phone. And with the inverting bracket, we can now have upskirt shots without the blur!

Re:stedicam+phone

Though with all that pipework and the dumbbell, you would be hard-pressed not to make your picturephone look like some sort of S&M apparatus, or a sex toy on Viagra.

Re:stedicam+phone

I would be able to see the forest, if all these damn trees weren't blocking my view!

Given the context, I really hope that that is just your signature.

What I'd like to know...

How'd he manage to build it without Duct tape!? Now that's impressive.

Re:What I'd like to know...

Some of my friends cling to the notion that the two greatest things in this world are duct tape and Gold Bond.

This of course is sheer nonsense. Any connoisseur would know that the two greatest things in the world are duct tape and WD-40. :-)

But sadly there are still some things [csittl.com] that they cannot do.

Hey a DUAL Purpose steadicam

Wow thats got a dual purpose, works to keep your movement from interefeing with the shot and if the actors get out of line you can break it down and beat em with the pipe, also works great for self-defense when shooting ghetto style.

Ouch...

Posted to /. with videos on the page to show sample footage. I'd say he's about to get hosed, but he is at CMU so I doubt it'll blink.

As I was reading his setup I was really expecting his footage to look like crap, but after watching the sample they really are incredibly smooth given that it was only $14 to make. Props.

Lego steadicam

LEGO (C) Hand Held Stabilizer [astercity.net]

xox,
Dead Nancy

Aliens

I always wanted to use one of those industrial strength ones to build the machine gun supporting apparatus from Aliens. :)

It real (and really cheap)

Saw this in RES magazine last year. Built one in under 30 mintues and with exactly $16 worth of parts. It actually works too, though you do have to practice with it to get good at controling your own body movement. Also, I reccomend making the lower section about 50% longer than the upper section to further even out movement.

Spielberg wannabe?

Actually, more of a Kubrick wannabe

obligatory Sam Raimi reference

Bruce Campbell in "If Chins Could Kill" relates some of the improvised steady-cams used in 'Evil Dead', especially for running shots or window shots.

They just had 2 people carry a heavy board with the camera through the forest, and had a 'camera plus battering ram' for the crash-through bits.

A lot less elegant than this design, basically, the idea of "really heavy = not much vibation or wobble" worked for them.

Re:obligatory Sam Raimi reference

You also have Peter Jackson who improvised his own steady-cam for the recording of Bad Taste. In that commentary (I saw it on VHS with behind the scenes extras, not sure if it matches the DVD releases.) he tells that he used a standard desktop lamp (those with an arm with an "elbow" on it, balanced with springs). By changing the lamp to a camera, adding a counter weightand altering the tension of the springs he got a steady cam.

Damn!

How the fsck do you /. a .edu system?

Holy shit!

Depends on the .edu

But more often, the server. I've worked at the same university for about 6 years now, and at the various departments, we've been slashdotted a few times. Biggest difference between problems and smooth sailing? Dynamic content. At the school paper, it's a 100% static system. A PERL script takes all the stories and images and composes a bunch of static pages. This works well since the old content never changes (it's an archive of the news as released on that day). It ran on a dual P2 system and just laughed it off. I mean the system could have served more than it's 10MB link, if it has been asked to.

Just receantly the department I now work at got slashdotted (the meteor impact simulator). It was on a Sunblade with deceant stats, and the load average shot to 98 within a couple minutes. We finally offloaded it to a brand new (as in got it a week ago) Sun blade doing nothing but hosting that simulator and it was STILL at about a 25 load average, though it stayed up and serving.

Here we were on a much improved network (dual gig backbone to 3x OC-3s as opposed to the 10mb to 1x DS-3 back in the newspaper days), servers an couple orders of magnitude more powerful, and one dedidacted to serving, and yet got hit much harder. The big difference was the content was dynamic. The network wasn't even strained (it was all text anyhow) but the server was being asked to do a ton.

In this case it looks all static, so I'm guessing it's probably either the connection, or general load on the system. After all, this isn't his server, it's a departmental server, and probably one with a lot of users.

Thats amazing

Like any of you jog, let alone with a camcorder.

Nothing you can't do

with a background in marching band (or martial arts) and steady hands.

All he's doing is adding a weight to make it hard for you to move your hands. And you can tell he's having a rough time with it as many of the shots are crooked. It's not properly weighted on the other side so he has to push down with one hand, up with the other and maintain a horizontal position throughout the shot. And he can't do it so the image is tilted most of the time. He'd have a chance of keeping the horizontal straight if he made a "T" instead of an "L"

This is why real steady cams are mounted on the chest like a snare drum. The springs/hydrolics take care of the vertical bounce and the mounting position balances the horizontal. The operator would have to bend over to one side to tilt the shot. If you want to get an "up" shot you bend over, point the camera up and walk backwards.

This is also why most movies move the camera around a lot. Besides it adding to the scene. It's actually easier to keep a steady path of movement than to hold a camera still.

Ben

No

"This is also why most movies move the camera around a lot. Besides it adding to the scene. It's actually easier to keep a steady path of movement than to hold a camera still."

Keeping a camera still is trivial if you use a tripod. A steady path of movement gets expensive (in crew and equipment) quickly. The steadier you want it the more it costs. Even getting a non-jerky pan multiplies the cost of a tripod time ten.

The reason that movies move the camera a lot is because that is usually what tells the story best.

That same background

helped get me a modeling gig. Marching band teaches you how to walk both confidently and with style.

In my old school marching band was just walking up and down the street. In my new school it was walking up and down the street I think once or twice but the rest of the time it was doing half time shows and competitions with formations and whatnot which was really cool. I had to learn how to basically run and play at the same time while keeping the instrument level.

Kind of like running with a video camera and not bouncing it around.

A lot of people don't get the practical applications of things like that because they're too concerned with not being "geeky" and just plain short sighted.

And this is why schools tend to cut music programs while the athletic department gets gobs of money.

Ben

Slashdotted? Here is a PDF copy of the site!

I was able to load the site, and printed a copy to PDF. Download it here! (right-click, save as)

The $14 Steadycam [yorbamicro.com]

Look into something more sophisticated...

I've built one of these too, and all things being equal, I think you would be better off spending $120 to get one of the Steady cam clones. True, he has some cool shots on his page but those are not nearly as easy as he makes it out to be. Maybe I am just clumsy.

When I walk forward my system wants to behave like a pendulum causing the camera to rock forward and back around the horizonal fulcrum. If things aren't perfectly balanced it is very difficult to keep the cameras tilt at a given attitude. Your left hand (if you were the author in the photo on the page) will not be able to keep the attitude without pendulum style oscillation. It's also difficult to make the camera turn around the camera of the horiontal bar and the fact that the rotational inertia of the person-pipe-camera system is not appropriate for turning around the camera.

Beyond those basic problems: it's also hard to hold on to and I tend to smack into door frames and innocent bystanders with the horizonal pipe.

One of the key parts to a steady cam rig is a gimbal joint that isolates tilt/tip motions of your hand from the "mass" that has the camera. Without this isolation it's really hard to get good shots without Zen master balance or just being lucky.

If anyone out there wants to make a Steady-cam like rig, I suggest they copy something like the Flowpod [varizoom.com]. Note the gimbal connecting the handle to the body of the device.

Re:Look into something more sophisticated...

I've built one of these too, and all things being equal, I think you would be better off spending $120 to get one of the Steady cam clones. True, he has some cool shots on his page but those are not nearly as easy as he makes it out to be. Maybe I am just clumsy.

I can kinda understand where you're coming from, but honestly, it kind of erks me. And I've started seeing quite a few of these in this article. This guy spent $14 and maybe thirty minutes to an hour learning how to get the thing to work well, and yet for some reason paying nine times as much and also taking some time to learn to use it seems like a better idea?

Maybe if you can afford it. I'm a poor college kid who has several expensive hobbies. What you are saying is, I would be better off taking my car to a car audio store and having them install my stereo system for me, at the cost of $300 or so. That or I can do it myself, take a few days longer, for $40, and maybe not look quite as good. In my case I thought it was pretty damned close, and even though it took me a lot longer, I got the satisfaction of doing it myself. Thats the key thing here, I think, that most people miss.

He improvised, saved some money, and made a pretty good gadget himself. Decent accomplishment even if it isn't as good as something that costs nine times more. And thats just the cheap one, right?

Now, as far as him trying to make money off of it, I might see where you could complain about that. I think I would in his case too, but I don't think that would bother me as much.

Not quite the same thing.

This isn't quite the same as a real steadicam. What makes steadicam rigs so smooth is the combination of the weight AND the gimballing. His $14 unit has the weight, but requires that your HAND be the gimbal mount. Even the cheapest, simplest steadicam unit (the Steadicam Jr [steadicam.com]) has a gimballed grip. One of the most important things you can do with a real steadicam is set the shot angle of the camera beforehand and, no matter how much you tilt the handgrip, the shot angle stays the same. Also, real steadicam techniques involve panning the camera by applying minute preassure with the fingertip to make the rig swivel on the grip. Again, the $14 model can't do that.

Cripes, it's a T-shaped pipe arrangement with a weight. Steadicam it ain't.

Re:Not quite the same thing.

If it's simply weight that they guy is adding to the camera, to make sudden changes in momentum more difficult

That's not at all what he's doing. The key to the steadycam is that the center of gravity of the apparatus is inside the handle (which is why you need a weight on the end of a pole to counterbalance the camcorder). This means that as you yank the camcorder around by the handle, *only* the position of the camera changes, not the orientation. This removes the much of the "jerkiness" of handheld shots that otherwise screams "low-budget amateur video!" Even without a gimbal mount for the handle, this device can still reduce handheld video jerkiness by a significant amount. Of course a gimbal-mounted handle would be better and would allow easier smooth panning, but it would be hard to do for $14 with commonly-available parts and easy assembly.

You'd probably get better results

Just building a weighted shoulder mount. The problem with damn DV cams these days is they are TINY, Some of them, I can almost wrap my hand completely around. Little thing like that is really hard to keep steady. It's hard to even get a good 2-handed grip on it. Well you could probably get pretty good results be designing a mount for it that rested on your shoulder and added about 5-10 pounds. It then has a brace, and some weight to it, like a real professional camera.

I mean watch a football game. There are tons of shoulder mounted shots that are quite good. As with anything, the skill of the operator is a large factor, but you don't need a stedicam to get a deceant shot, just a solid unit on your shoulder. Probably better than this, since this unit is going to want to act like a pendulum when faced with motion.

let's play watch the page hit counter!

In the two minutes it took me to skim the page and hit reload, his counter went up by 780. I wonder how long it will take before either the network admin shuts down his account or it wraps around. :)

Getting good results...

Its a ghetto type job, but it looks like it works. This quote from the article is a little disturbing though:

Getting good results is not so much about the equipment, but how you use it.

I tried that bit on my girlfriend but she didn't fall for it.

There was an old magazine called Cinemagic

It ran in the 80's, briefly. It was a special-effects howto for 16mm and 8mm. There was an article in one that described how to build a better "steadicam" than this, using pvc pipe and springs. I think that one actually worked better than the one in this article, as it handled horizontal as well as vertical. It also strapped to the body. The author received a cease & desist from the Steadicam people (he offered to sell completed versions of his as well).

Better Links

The 14$ thingy is pure crap...

if you want some real inspiration check out the following websites:

http://homebuiltstabilizers.com/
The original site for all your home built video needs

http://pub173.ezboard.com/bhomebuiltstabilizers
Discussion forum full of lots of useful information

http://www.codydeegan.com/

Might take a bit more effort, but the results are incredible. Cody's plans are awesome, and I would gladly purchase them again.

Not a Steadicam

With the exception of the Steadicam JR [steadicam.com], most Steadicams [steadicam.com] have a body harness. That makes them much more stable than using you hand.

This is really more similiar to a lower end Glidecam [glidecam.com] stabilizer (even this is floating).

There are also some rather cheap [markertek.com] alternatives out there to make a camcorder smoother.

Granted this is significantly cheaper to make than these products, but from my experience anything that is handheld doesn't work as well as the bodyrigs. Personally, I'd rather just do it by hand alone.

You also might want to check out a relatively cheap [markertek.com] jib [glidecam.com] too.

Glidecam

Some type of stedicam can really make a difference in low budget films. Sure wish I had one back in the day [crazyeddy.com]. I did buy a Glidecam 3000 [glidecam.com] (discontinued... but very similar to the one on the right) for $300 on ebay a couple years back. It works quite well though it gets mighty tiring on the arm after a few minutes. I'm using a Canon GL1 these days, which is a bit heavier than most consumer cameras.

One thing that I found very interesting about the whole steadicam thing is that it's not so much XYZ movement that causes visible camera shake, but the rotational movements (heading, pitch, bearing). That's what the gimbal mechanism on a steadicam eliminates. My model is handheld and doesn't have a spring loaded arm or vest, so there's still a fair amount of XYZ movement... but the shots still look stable.

With the camera usually looking at objects several feet away, moving up or down a fraction of an inch doesn't change the field of view much. But tilting the camera forward or back even a tiny amount changes the field of view a great deal. This wasn't intuitive to me until I tried the thing out.

Without any real experience, I doubt this guy's rig (basically a big weighted handle) is going to make shots much steadier than a careful handheld shot. I'd surely give it a try though, if I wasn't already set.

Anyways, steadicams are pretty cool.

Cheers.

That is *not* a steadycam.

A monopod with a handle isn't a steadycam. Steadycam uses gimbals, springs and a bodymount to basically put a shock absorber between you and the camera.

All this does is add more weight - which will help you hold your modern teeny-tiny camera steady, but's that's far cry from being able to hold the camera still while you jog up the Art Museum steps.

How strange

How weird is it to go to the site, read the text, then watch the movie, only to see some very familiar backgrounds. I then looked at the url and realized that it is from the same school I go to. No wonder the download was so fast :)

Want to do more, cheaper?

Buy a pair of wrist weights and wear them whenever you can.

Seriously.

I play baritone in a competitive drum & bugle corps, and the first thing I did when our winter rehearsals started was to purchase a pair of wrist weights (a G baritone bugle weighs about 7 pounds, and we are expected to hold them in front of our faces for up to two hours or more at a time, repeated throughout the day). I wear them whenever I practice, whenever I just hold the horn up, and anytime else where it's not blatantly inappropriate. After about a month, not only was the horn easier to hold up, but--surprise surprise--my hands were generally a hell of a lot steadier than before.

With steady hands, you don't need a steadying device for the camera--and the stronger arms are an added plus.

SteadyHand

When I was in high school making short films, I tried building a ghetto steadicam, but found it much easier to not use one and fix the footage in post with some software I found called SteadyHand [dynapel.com], from Dynapel [dynapel.com]. I bought it, but the demo version actually only puts a watermark in a corner, so theoretically you could just crop it out if you wanted to do it that way.

Nowadays I would probably fix it in combustion, where I'd have more control over it.

Might be great for making porn

Maybe this will help out some of the people who make amateur porn and just can't seem to hold the camera still. Just don't let John Ashcroft find out.

Am I the only one who think's he's the real-life version of John Lithgow's character in Footloose?

Lee

An even simpler solution

There's a cute trick you can use to do impromptu steadicam work.

All you need is a tripod (the heavier the better).

Collapse the legs so they are as short as possible.

Make a peace sign with your hand.

Use those two fingers, curled up (palm up) to hold the tripod under the camera base, so the whole thing is supported on the tips of your two fingers.

The weight of the tripod legs will put the center of mass under the support point (your fingers).

Your arm muscles, tendons and ligaments make natural dampeners.

I've use this several times with good results.

Well, that looks simple...

... but a bit uneffective. It's missing a lot of really important parts like a gimbal, for example. Nobody has steady enough arms to hold that stick and not to do any unwanted panning or tilting. Or if you do have such an arm, why are you reading this discussion at all - you don't need a steadicam.

If you don't care the hours the building takes, then I'd suggest building something like this guy did: a full steadicam-like setup with a vest, two suspension arms, a fully working gimbal and all the stuff this $14 poor man's "steadicam" has [jamesarnett.com]. The costs? About $30, plus 20 hours of work. Sure, it looks ugly but you can't beat the price for the functionality. You'll need stabilizer arms for a stable picture while running or glimbing stairs.

(As a sidenote, "SteadiCam" is a trademarked term. Wikipedia has more information about steadicams in general [wikipedia.org].)

A few more homebuilt stabilizer links...

• Steadicam Physics and Construction Hints [geocities.com]
• Do-It-Yourself Stabilizer for the XL-1 [videouniversity.com]
• • Plus, as a bonus:
  • 
    Create Your Own Camera Boom [pacifier.com]

Shot Glass Gimbal

When I built a stabilizer rig, I used a nail and a Jack Daniels whisky shot glass for the gimbal. The nail's point was rounded, and was at the center of gravity of the rig. It sat in the shot glass, which I held. This allowed for plenty of horizontal rotation, and about 30 degrees of tilt.

Re:Easy Question

this isn't really new, I studied under the great Steven Speilbergo and we used these all the time.

Note to Moderators

Please mark as "Overrated" due to poster's plea not to be moderated as redundant and the fact it's boring and not really related to this discussion at all.

Re:Inventor of the original Steadicam

I saw a documentary about Garrett Brown, and it showed his various prototype stages. The original one looked exactly like this - a length of pipe. The second one was more like a pantograph to try to keep the camera level. Then he added the seperate handle connected to the upright portion wih a gimbal. The rest of the development was on the counter-balance arm and the vest. All of this was necessary because Brown was building these for 35mm film cameras.

If you're looking to improve this design, the things I'd look at are: a gimbal, so allow the operator to hold the unit more comfortably and lightly, and avoid transferring hand motion to the camera; a sliding mount at the top, to allow the camera's balance to be shifted forward and back to tilt up or down.

The Steadycam JR Lite [steadicam.com] is a great one to look at. It was designed by the great Frogdesign studio (the NeXT cube). The camera sits on top of a slide, and right on top of the gimbal and handle. The arm is divided into two parts at a 90 degree angle, connected to the slide at 45 degrees. And the whole thing folds up. It's a wonderfully slick design - and obscenely overpriced [bhphotovideo.com].