There
are several commercial camcorder stabilizer options,
which range from approximately $200 on up. You can also
make one yourself for about $30 plus a weekend of work
with some hand tools. It won't look as professional
as the commercial products, but it works pretty well.
Other
steady-cam pages: my design was inspired by Chris Santucci's
XL1 stabilizer, although
I did the pivot/gimble a bit differently. Steven-Marc
Couchouron has another design at dvforever.com (in
French, but the photos tell the story). You don't actually
need a pivot: Gaby Kafka contributed a simpler design,
see below,
and the UVA Film Club has a simple, rugged design.
To quote their page, "getting good results is not so much
about the equipment but how you use it. That's really
true about everything."
I
describe my design on this page, although it should be
evident you could make different choices for materials
and methods and have a stabilizer that works just as well.
First, the parts needed (all from a hardware store):
Stabilizer
Parts:
1
ball-bearing, 1/2" I.D., 1 3/8" O.D. (sold by California
Caster as a bearing for a wheel)
1 diameter reducer insert, 1/2" to 3/8" (also
from California Caster)
1 3/8" diam. all-thread rod. (need only a 3" length)
1 1" male pipe adapter, PVC
1 wooden handle. (I used one intended for a cement
trowel)
2 small brass hinges (similar to, but smaller than
the one shown)
1/4" thick poplar
3/4" or 1" thick pine (not shown)
a small hardwood block (not shown)
1/2" aluminum tubing (not shown)
1/8" solid brass rod (not shown)
I made a lightweight, but sturdy enough, camera platform
out of two layers of 1/4" poplar glued together with Elmer's
"carpenter's wood glue". I built up a section on the front
end with two more smaller poplar sections to take up the
stress of the Al tubing, and used a 1/2" boring bit to
make a hole for the tube. I fixed it in place with 1-hour
epoxy. (5-minute epoxy is considerably weaker). You can
make even slow epoxy harden quickly, by putting it in
the oven set at "warm" (eg. about 150 F). Don't overdo
the temperature or you'll get bubbles.
The
heart of this type of stabilizer is the pivot or gimble.
I made a gimble (pivots on two axes at once) using
two hinges soldered together at right angles. I hard-soldered
the tab sections using silver-bearing solder and a propane
torch (careful not to get solder into the hinge joint
itself). You might be able to just bolt the hinges together,
but the bolt clearance may limit motion. The hinge body
and center pin are just solid brass, but I oiled the hinge
joints and they move nicely. The top hinge is screwed
to a small hardwood block, in turn screwed to the underside
of the camera platform, and the bottom hinge is held in
the PVC pipe fitting as you see below.
The
hinges allow the camera to pitch forward and back, and
roll left and right. The ball-bearing allows rotation
around a vertical axis. I cut about 3" of 3/8" all-thread
rod and bored a hole in the top of the wood handle to
receive this rod. The top of the rod has two nuts which
capture the bearing, with the 3/8" reducer insert. I didn't
need to use the washers shown in the parts photo. The
wood handle is shortened and sanded down from the original
shape.
Saw
off the threaded part of the PVC fitting and put it in
the oven at about 200 F to soften it. When it is slightly
soft, press it over the bearing- it should fit tightly.
(My fitting is deformed due to overheating- I practically
melted it.)
I
used the materials you spec for the gimble and found
a different way to insert the ball bearings into the
pvc. A metal working friend of mine suggested it. Put
the ball bearing pack on a surface like the basement
cement floor. Heat it with a torch and then press the
PVC into it. It worked great and really melted it with
out needing my wife's oven. She was not happy about
the idea of heating PVC in it. Tim Ruf (July 14 2003)
When
cool, use a hacksaw to cut a slot to receive the lower
tab of the hinge, and also make diagonal slices off the
top edge to allow the hinge assembly more freedom to tilt
over left and right. Then, mount the bearing on the threaded
rod and epoxy the PVC fitting on top of the bearing. I
drilled two 1/8" holes in the fitting and used two bent
lengths of 1/8" brass as retainer pins to hold the hinge
assembly in place. This is just for ease of reconfiguration
and disassembly; you could also use bolts, or epoxy. The
1/2" aluminum tube sections running forward and down from
the camera platform terminate in wood blocks which were
bored lengthwise with the 1/2" drill. The tube is held
in the blocks with transverse 1/8" brass pins.
After
assembling the stabilizer, you have to balance it by selective
addition of weights. Fix the handle in a vise, place the
camera on top, and start adding counterweights to the
front and bottom blocks. You can see bolts and an iron
washer taped to these blocks in my top photo. You can
also move the camera back and forward for fine adjustment.
Note that the LCD screen position, wide-angle lens attachment,
and battery are all factors which affect balance point.
Having achieved a good balance, mark the correct point
and drill a 1/4" hole for the 1/4-20 bolt which matches
the camera's tripod mounting socket. If you're going to
use different batteries, lens adaptors, or cameras (!)
you'll probably need to drill different holes, as well
as adjust the counterbalance weights.
The
bearing has more turning resistance than the hinges, but
the final assembly has enough inertia that I get very
smooth motion on all three axes. My two-hinge gimble design
puts the forward-back pitch axis (upper hinge pin) about
3 mm above the side-to-side roll axis. You can actually
feel this difference when balancing: when you add weight
so that the overall center of mass coincides with the
lower pivot, the stabilizer is neutral for side-to-side
roll motion (you can tilt it to any angle and it stays
there), but it still has a restoring force in the pitch
direction (release it from off-vertical and it swings
like a pendulum). If you make the pitch direction neutral,
the roll axis is overbalanced and the camera will tend
to roll over. In any case, I find the design is useful,
and I was impressed by my test video walking around indoors-
on playback, the camera really seems to be floating through
the air.
By
the way, you can use any materials you want. I just happened
to use what I did because that's what the hardware store
had. I did intentionally choose aluminum tubing because
I wanted the whole thing to be as lightweight as possible,
so I used a lightweight frame, and just added the minimum
counterbalance weight necessary, exactly where needed.
There
is something of an art to balancing this (or any other)
stabilizer. You add weights to the front elbow and the
bottom of the arm until the center of mass of the entire
camera+platform+arm+weights is just a millimeter or so
below the hinge pivot point, and centered on it so that
the camera does not tend to rotate forward, back, or to
the side. At that point, it will be just barely stable,
almost wanting to tip over, but any hand motion will not
much affect the aiming of the camera. You can "steer"
the camera into a turn by swinging the bottom of the handle
part left or right. If your camera rocks back and forth
when you come to a stop, you probably have too much weight
on the bottom; try removing some until the camera starts
to tip over, then add a tiny bit back.
This
stabilizer (and any other one) is best used with wide-angle
shots only. I have used an external wide-angle adaptor.
You will need to balance the assembly with the adaptor
mounted, of course.
