Movi Pro Pan Balance

I have the same issue with my C300 Mark II. The pan motor is so loud, that when I shoot a scene with sound (boom) I simply cannot use the sound from the shot. The sound kills practically every shoot when sound is needed.

 

Hi Martin, what kind of noise are you experiencing? It should be pretty quiet, if not perfectly silent. If it's a high-pitched buzzing sound, it could be a tuning problem -- your stiffness values may be too high, or your filters too low.

Try reducing the level of AutoTune to 50%, or go in the App and you can see a red 'noise' indicator, which shows you the axis that needs to be adjusted. You can then manually reduce the stiffness or that axis or increase the filter a little.

Feel free to share your settings.

 

It took a while for me to figure out the fastest way to balance all axis. I get it as close as possible, run autotune, check the balance screen. Move the ring around a bit or bump the MoVI in all 3 axes and you will quickly see which way to move the components or where to put the counterweights. If everything seems perfectly tight and you are positive that the clamp to for the Toad is tight enough, and you are still getting noise with the Autotune level set to 50% for a boom mount then something is out of balance and you should see an off-center red marker on Pan Bar on the Ballance screen. Tilting the Movi toward and away from you will quickly tell you if the rig is nose heavy or tail heavy because the marker will be farther to one side when the rig is tipped. Sleep the MoVI and move the pan bar about a 1/4" and test again. The change should be obvious and tell you if you are moving in the right direction. If the Ballance screen shows tilt and roll markers pretty much in the middle you should be able to fine tune pan balance in a few seconds. If you cannot achieve an acceptable pan balance then you need an off-center counterweight and a slight roll balance adjustment to get it to be perfect.

I found that anything on the rig that is not tied down well can cause a noisy vibration. I had to tighten the antennas on my wireless audio receiver, make sure that all of the camera accessories were really snug and that the cables were appropriately tied down and not heavy enough to resonate. Now that I've done this about 100 times I'm having absolutely no discernable noise from the MoVI. The loudest sound coming from my rig is the cooling fan on the Shogun Inferno that I use as a recorder.

 

I am not sure where we left off on this, but I’m having the same issue with the pan. Am I correct that this is just the way it is and when the Movi is resting on its feet, it will swing to the side, but when handheld it will be fine?

Just seems odd that so many have this issu and Freefly have not given us a solution.

 

If you are having performance issues during operation and want support from Freefly, contact Freefly Support.

 

I just want to know if it’s ok or normal for the Movi to pan left or right and not center when resting on both legs. During operation it seems ok, but only if I auto tune to 50 percent.

 

If it sits to one side, while resting in the Ring with the motors powered down, but works fine when you power the motors, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

 

Understood. I will do more tests to make sure it is working as should when powered on. Thank you.

 

The documentation and tutorial videos about pan balance are not very helpful at all. It would be nice if freefly would do an in depth video about this part of the balancing process. It seems like it is near impossible to get a perfectly balanced pan axis without the use of counterweights, but also seems that this is not really a problem for handheld use, however it is clearly causing a lot of confusion because this is never stated on any official documentation. The manual adds to the confusion because it asks you to do balancing techniques using the ring that are physically impossible when carrying medium to heavy camera packages, but does not offer any alternative ways to balance.