Dope Tech: Camera Robots!

hey what is up guys um could be HC here and you've probably seen a Dali camera move something like that or maybe you've seen a sort of a slow pan an arcing shot these are all pretty common what about something more complicated for that you're gonna need something a little more dope [Music] sup 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 let me explain 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 Keira Keira has been responsible for tons of shots and commercials for tech products and car videos etc and you might not even noticed but those are the shots that aren't CGI but that are super precise and difficult that human could never deal 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 cure of robot itself is fully metal extends up to 9 feet tall has a couple fully articulating axes and it can move up to 9 feet per second in any direction while carrying up to 40 pounds and on 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 set the position you can move the robot through space and time to other positions with keyframes in the software NP 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 that 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 your pointed out and you have a remote start/stop but you also get all your red raw 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 Kirra 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 it you got to 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 keyframes 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 [Music] 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 focus 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 this 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 [Music] okay so this one is 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 decide 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 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 a little walking tracking shot [Music] 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 robots 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 obviously you can take this thing to the next level if you 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 underrate the software NP studio there are older iterations of this same sort of robot control thing we literally had 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 take care you mind if we do this outro together so we're just gonna wave goodbye ready thanks for watching guys talk to you next one peace [Music]

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 5,503,987

Rating: 4.9638152 out of 5

Keywords: cinema robots, cinema robot, motorized precision, kira, mia, mp, mp kira, mp mia, camera robot, RED, Arri, MKBHD, cinebot bolt, cinebolt

Id: UIwdCN4dV6w

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Bassically23]

I love his reaction at the end. You know he was hyped for this.

[u/DisgracedCubFan]

This is amazing. Might be my favorite video of his, and I've been a sub for like 4 years.

[u/Sayfog]

"imagine something like a phantom on this"

Looking at you Slo Mo Guys

[u/grizzlywhere]

Kira @ 8:14

This is a triumph. I'm making a note here, huge success.

[u/JUAN_DE_FUCK_YOU]

Wonder how much it costs to rent those robots? Wish he had mentioned some figures.

[u/Joe_Run_Now]

Does anyone know the song at 5:21? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIwdCN4dV6w&feature=share

[u/bmxkelowna]

That laptop shop was amazing

[u/xXx_Bacalhau_xXx]

Dopest video to date.

[u/ZetaZebra]

I only do a little video work and I was super excited throughout that video. Also, Marques was having so much fun, as was easily seen, that I was super happy for him 😂.