Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “$75 vs $10,000 camera setup!”.
This video is sponsored by shuwin making videos can get expensive so for us we primarily use a blackmagic ursa mini pro g2 to film our videos, but to make it work, you need a lens. You need batteries. You need an ssd to record a top handle a side handle the price tag gets over ten thousand dollars like crazy fast. But what if i told you you could do most of the same things with the phone. That’S in your pocket and this. So this is the shoe in smooth xs, it’s follow-up to gimbal. We actually did a whole video on uh the smooth x uh. This guy is incredibly simple and easy, and for 75 bucks you get a really nice kit of the gimbal, the tripod and the carrying case, and setting this thing up is is also incredibly easy. So power button on the side turn on blinks put up the arm pop in your phone, in this case we’re pairing it with a white iphone sc. I just thought the white and the white looked really good and also wanted to show that for around 500 bucks to phone the gimbal, you get a really amazing, capable you know video set without having to break your bank or, in our case, spend ten thousand dollars On a camera, i wanted to show you some of the shots you can get with this combination, to show that you don’t have to do it on a really expensive camera.
I know a lot of folks out. There are looking to start their own youtube channel. Looking to get some cinematic sweeping shots and the general thought is, you have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars and if you have good equipment, you know how to use it. Keep that money in your [ Applause ] pocket, so so that shot through the wall. If we wanted to sort of do that with a traditional camera uh, we could use schumann’s own crane, 3s cost about 700 bucks or use other gimbals. It could cost upwards of 4 500..
So gimbals like that traditionally are three axis with the smooth xs you’ve got two axes and the third isn’t really necessary because it’s utilizing the phone’s own stabilization. So you can see, as i twist my wrist it stays then the other one. You can actually rotate the whole phone.
You don’t have to really worry that much about a tilt because utilize, the phone’s own stabilization, so that shot looks pretty simple but trying to do that with the cinema camera and any of those gimbals. I talked about it’s going to come down to two things: size and price. Those blue pillars are incredibly close together and trying to get a cinema camera and a really big gimbal through them. Uh is going to be next to impossible all right, so some people might use an easy rig or a ready rig with two big handles across the top. That’S another two thousand dollars that could accomplish what we just did with this all right. So the smooth xs has a couple modes.
First, one is pf mode. Essentially it’s a pan mode. You control it with your wrist, you twist, your wrist and the phone will rotate and stay on that even plane.
So next it goes into l mode. It’S a lock mode. You push the m button once and it’s going to lock everything down and the phone is going to stay locked, really, no matter what you do or how you move it.
This is my favorite mode to play with. If we’re being honest, you ever seen a chicken try to turn his head smooth playing field in any of these modes too. There’S a joystick which you can control and you can let it do some little manual motions if you’re into that thing, and obviously you don’t always want to shoot in sort of landscape mode. Sometimes you want to slew in portrait two clicks on the m button. A little magic happens and then you’ve got that, and all of you have your same stabilization, the same mode you had before just in portrait mode, you can even pull it up a little bit, extend it and get kind of that selfie angle. To get that shot.
You want all right, so the last mode, and probably one of the coolest ones, is pov mode. So you tap the m button four times and it’ll activate all of the axes for you, sort of giving you sort of the full control and all the motors working on your gimbal. So obviously, when you’re panning it’ll move with you, but when you’re tilting it’ll also move with you, alright, so that’s pretty good, but there’s one more shot that i want to try.
That’S a shot. I’Ve been wanting to do for a while, but to get something like that with a cinema, camera you’re going to need like a jib and a track that you use on hollywood, sets or you’re going to need a really heavy slider. Probably gon na be able to have the door closed, you have to fake it with the door open and just gets really expensive, and i’m talking like price of most car level expensive to get that with a cinema camera, and we just did it on something for Under 500 bucks, i imagine if i took that shot edit it and graded it inside of a clip that had other cinema shots bookending it, you probably wouldn’t even know it was filmed with an iphone se. So i haven’t touched too much on the app yet, but you’ll need it to get started. It’S called zy cammy, it’s obviously available for ios or android.
You can do a ton of stuff. Inside of that app you can do live streaming, panoramic photos and a ton more. But probably my favorite, aside from the really cool hyperlapse, is a mode called gesture mode. So i turn on gesture mode.
Stand in front of the camera wave, my hand, it’ll start counting down three two one, and now it’s going to start following me. If i wanted to it’s going to keep things nice and smooth, so no matter where i go, it’s going to always get that really smooth shot. If you’re farther away, you can use the zoom that’s built into the gimbal. Obviously, when you’re out shooting it’s nice to have a crew, but a lot of times you don’t or your one-man operation, you still want the ability to get those really smooth shots, maybe drink a narration while you’re talking. This is where something like having a gimbal like the smooth xs is really going to come in handy. So i think a lot of times. People underestimate the ability of the cameras built into their phones. I’M not advocating like replacing a cinema camera for hollywood movies. With this setup, but it is really nice sort of have, in addition to those cameras, or if you want to shoot youtube videos yourself, you can do a lot, there’s a lot of power with just the camera on your phone and a gimbal like i said, if You use some of these clips and you edit it you grade it and you put it next to really cinema level clips chances are, you would never know the difference, but you saved the money of having to buy a jib or an easy rig or expensive slider. You know with just something that costs 75. It shouldn’t be the only tool in a filmmaker’s tool kit, but it really is an essential one, one, that’s always with us whenever we’re out filming. If you want to learn more, you want to check out the shoe in smooth xs link to it down below .