The short with an iconic opening movi shot that only the movi can do An excellent BTS and movi review video by former indi-mogul host Griffin Hammond. A GroPro3 is mounted onto the movie and handheld comparisons are intelligently spliced together. Cheers! Credit to: Actors - Björn Lindsey, Brenden Lindsey and Brian Lindsey Director/Writer - Jason Lindsey Executive Producer - Talia Watkins Director of Photography - Myles Beeson and Jason Lindsey Movi operators - Lucas Miller, Myles Beeson and Jason Lindsey Gaffer/Key Grip - Taylor Strohmeyer Camera - Canon C100 with Atomos Ninja 2 Disk Recorder on a Movi M10
I think the characterization of "lots of tedious adjustments" indicates that they've not practiced balancing enough. I've found that you rapidly develop a workflow of the sequence of what to adjust (no secret: tilt, roll, pan!), and techniques for where to hold the camera and MōVI and nail the balancing for each axis in a time ranging from a few seconds or tens of seconds. Sure, changing to a new camera/lens combination for the first time may take 20 minutes or longer, but, in my experience, that's mostly experimentation rather than the normal switchover adjustment kind of balancing. Andy.
You're are very correct Andy. The whole purpose of the shoot was to test what the movi could do so the "rebalancing" issue Griffin points out in the video is based upon newbie experience and it was more a learning process for the group; therefore, it didn't reflect the speed of one who has used the Movi extensively. Griffin's audience is teetered more toward the hobbyist and lower prosumer market so this may justify his unjustly characterization of balancing the Movi. If you read the comments, people are complaining about the price of the Movi when as we know it is very reasonable in comparison to other professional stabilization systems, thus indicating the intentions of his viewers. What would be great though is scaled markings along the adjustment rails for each balancing dimension on the movi. That way one could write down the exact measurements for each setup and minimize downtime between altering setups. Thanks for the reply! Best, Lucas
Good points, Lucas. I've experimented with using a Sharpie oil-based pen on the CF booms to mark approximate positions, but I found there really was no repeatability. What I found was, to paraphrase the late Gilda Radner (of Saturday Night Live fame), "It's always something!" -- in this case, something's always different. So while markings might get you in the ballpark, I'm not sure you could have an hypothetical notation like 25, 33, 41 that would allow you to nail it the next time. You'd still end up having to hand balance it -- at least that's been my experience. Andy.
Totally agree. Due to the nature of the Movi, ballpark is all that would be obtainable with scaled notations and honestly that's all I would ask for. Myself and a lot of the people I work with have a smorgasbord of lenses. I have a couple Zeiss primes and the rest are Canon L or Rokinon Cines. The weight difference in addition to the compact nature of a Zeiss 17mm in comparison to a Canon 100mm is drastic so even if markings gave me a ballpark estimation when swapping between the two it would still save me a minute or two on set. I have definitely thought about marking on the rails but it's not my movi to mark =) in due time i suppose. Best case scenario, to alleviate this downtime, would be to buy two Movis then put two fast Zooms on each of them which may take a couple years for me to finance that kind of setup. Until then, I may go with your sharpie suggestion, seems more cost effective =) Cheers Andy! Steve Maller - Thanks for the compliment!
I don’t have a MōVI, but what if there was a way to score or print the booms with a scale of some sort, so that they’d look like a ruler. That would be useful, I think. I’ve done something like that on my DIY.
We were going to run a batch of CF rods with ruler markings, but found that the professionals on here preferred to dial in their own adjustments on the Movi. Some said it became like 2nd nature to them, so the markings would be unnecessary after some practice.