Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Dope Tech: Camera Robots!”.
Hey, what is up guys, mkbhd here and you’ve, probably seen a dolly camera move, something like that, or maybe you’ve seen a sort of a slow, pan and arcing shot. These are all pretty common. What about something more complicated for that you’re gon na need something a little more dope, what’s up guys mkbhd here and welcome back to dope tech for this one, we flew out to portland oregon home of motorized precision to take a look at some robots, but not Just any robots, these are what i would call cinema robots and as someone that’s into video at all, this is absolutely dope tech. So, like i explained in the intro, there are all types of stabilizers and video tools and things like that to help a human move, a camera in a certain way and actually in most shots, you can kind of tell what type of device is being used like This shot dolly cam.
This would be a steadicam. This is clearly a slider and this is a crane, but you’ve probably seen some crazy shots in a movie or in a music video somewhere for a shot like this, the answer is: kira. Kira has been responsible for tons of shots in commercials for tech products and car videos etc, and you might not even notice, but those are the shots that aren’t cgi, but that are super, precise and difficult that a human could never do with any tools that exist.
Now hence the name motorized precision and then the level of dope tech is actually twofold. Here, it’s the hardware, with the actual robots and mp studio, the software to control what these robots do and they can do a lot. Here’S the rundown, so the kira robot itself is fully metal, extends up to nine feet. Tall has a couple fully articulating axes and it can move up to nine feet per second in any direction while carrying up to 40 pounds and then the robot is controlled. With an xbox controller, which has enough buttons to hit every axis, so you get forward and backward you get up and down pan left and pan right tilt up and tilt down, and even roll clockwise or roll counterclockwise, and once you’ve set the position you can move The robot, through space and time to other positions with keyframes in the software mp studio and on top of that, if you’re using a manual lens, which you probably are at this point, there’s motorized gears, which are also part of the robot which can control focus. Iris and zoom during the camera move, and on top of all of that, if you’re shooting with a red camera which is also connected to the robot. Not only do you get a live preview of what you’re pointed at and you have a remote start stop, but you also get all your red rock controls, so you can change resolution, shutter, speed, compression ratio, white balance, etc. Then you hit record. It starts rolling on the camera and you run the kira and it plays through the move you made at the speed you picked and then like i said it can go, really slow and smooth or it can go fast.
It might be hard to appreciate just how fast three meters per second really is, but it’s really fast, you got ta, you got ta know exactly what you’re doing to keep it safe and then, of course, the other upside of knowing exactly what you’re doing is all The shots you can get with it. The moves you can make are almost literally endless, so shout out to sean brown, the ceo of motorized precision for showing me all this, showing me the ropes of the software and giving some examples of what the robot can do. So really the only thing left to do now is actually shoot with it.
So that’s what we did first up the orbit shot. So this is fun. This is just a bunch of key frames highlighting different parts from different angles of the same subject and at every point the camera stops, and we made sure that keyframe also had the subject perfectly in focus and the end result just looks ridiculous, like you could see. Almost kind of like this cgi, the motion blur is just dependent on the shutter speed we picked, but it’s super real and then from behind the scenes you can see all the hinges working all the cables plugged into the camera straight into the robot. That’S talking to the computer, pretty incredible! If you ask me next up, we did a bit more of a traditional like a phone on a table shot which you’ve seen before, but with a twist check this one out: oh yeah, okay, so this one started off slow, like a normal slider shot like you’ve. Seen before, but then moved in quick and focused on the camera of the phone, you can probably imagine doing something like this with some motion, graphics or some tracked pointers in there and again that shows off the precision of the robot being able to nail the focus Instantly – and you can’t forget, the shot is also repeatable as many times as you want, so you can do it multiple times with different phones, different items stack the clips mess with opacity, etc.
It’S crazy, but for me the beauty of it is how close to the table the whole rig gets without touching it and there’s no worries because there’s no shake or wobble at all super precise okay. So this one was pretty simple, but still, if you saw it in a video, you might have your mind blown, but it’s up to the top spinning around and then down on the other side, and i even think having more time with it, we’d be able to Make this all like one continuous move, so you’d float over the top of the laptop spin around without stopping and then come down on the other side, but nevertheless pretty sure that’s next to impossible. Without this robot and then next, we decided to do something a little bit more difficult, okay, so that was sick, but the challenge here. What really makes this one more difficult is the fact that i’m a human, not a robot, and it’s actually really hard for me to hold myself on the phone in the exact same spot. For long enough that we can set up all the keyframes and the robot can do the move and get the phone in focus every time. So there’s actually plenty of takes that we didn’t use that ended with the phone being like a little bit out of focus because i had moved, but i think getting this one right made it that much more impressive and then last but not least, we broke out A bit of a different robot, also made by motorized precision this one’s called mia.
Instead of kira, it’s a little bit lighter a little bit smaller uh, but still equally impressive could probably fit something like this in our studio, wink wink. But it’s also now on a massive motorized track system, so we did a little walking tracking shot so obviously that one’s equally awesome for the little bit of time we had to play with it and set it up. You know matching my speed with the walking of the robot sliding speed and then stopping at just the right place, so it swings past my head instead of through my head, obviously absolutely worth it so that’s it. That’S the beauty of motorized precision, robots that control and hold cameras that can pull off low speed or high speed moves precisely that humans literally can’t. Obviously you can take this thing to the next level if you’ve got like a slow motion camera on there, like, if you imagine a phantom flex on this arm swinging around super fast, the shots you could get out of it are absolutely incredible and again, if you Can’T underwrite the software mp studio, there are older iterations of this same sort of robot control thing where you literally have to put in coordinates into an excel spreadsheet, to get a robot to move like this. So obviously this is miles better.
Generally, people don’t buy these robots, they get rented for certain shoots like the commercials and music videos we talked about, but uh. Let me know what would you use a robot like this for so either way? That’S been it uh, hey, kira, you mind. If we do this outro together, so we’re just gon na wave goodbye ready thanks for watching guys talk to you next one peace, .