Getting smooth footage with a gimbal

hey there everybody it's nathan cool with nathancoolphoto.com and in this video i want to cover how you can make sure to get very smooth video footage using a motorized gimbal now as you know i've got a couple of recent other videos and i'll be having more coming down the pike on doing some basic videography for real estate and of course that accompanies my latest book which is basic videography for real estate and i've got a link to that down in the description for this video here though i'm going to have other links to some of the other stuff that i'm going to be talking about which is some basics to make sure that no matter what you're doing you can get very fluid butter smooth type footage now you may find that it's very difficult no matter what technique you're using as i show in some of the other videos with using like the ninja wok to be able to get a smooth pan or something like that is just still jittery you might not be your technique there could be some stuff that you can fix on the gimbal itself so i'm going to cover a wide range of things there's never usually just one thing you watch a lot of these videos they'll tell you get smooth footage well you want to just balance it make sure you balance and do an auto tune and you'll be fine do a calibration there's other issues and i've been able to prove it to dji that they do have also firmware issues related to that so i'm going to cover all those things first the basics some of those firmware things and then worst case scenario what happens when you're stuck with something that still is just a little bit shaky a little bit off i'm going to show how to fix that in post processing so this is everything from top to bottom first thing is though we have to make sure that we have a very well balanced gimbal so look for that link if you haven't in that video you can watch on my youtube channel link to that description for the video if you haven't learned how to balance your gimbal yet and once again instructions for this are in the book as well but here we've got a very well balanced gimbal the power is off and i'm able to move this around and it stays put wherever i put it because i've got it very well balanced that's going to make sure that as i'm shooting that the motors are reacting in kind they're not over working they're not trying to compensate if they have to compensate too much they're going they're going to jitter and that's going to give you some shaky footage so obviously you're doing a smooth pan and also because it isn't very well balanced especially if you are doing in this case i like to do a pan tilt follow which means that as i'm moving that i can control all three axes so an important thing to be aware of got to make sure that that is balanced next thing is we're going to take a look on the app on the ronin app and some things that you have to make sure you take care of no matter what so i'm going to go ahead and turn on the gimbal first we have to turn on the battery and then there's the switch here on the other side and we pulled that in we'll hear a beep and that'll then boom and now it'll go to its center boom okay so now i can use the ronin app so i have this on your iphone your android phone whatever and you bring that up and the first thing you'll see is the main screen once you are connected to it by the way if you haven't registered your app there's instructions in the manual and also dji's product and other type of gimbals will have similar features as well so some of the crane stuff will be very similar to this so from the main screen here we want to first go to balance test when we're in the balance test on the bottom of the screen there's a thing called begin test so first thing right off the bat is if you've tested you've balanced your gimbal what you think is very good you need to run this test so i'm just going to click that blue button then you can watch it do its balance test this is kind of neat watching this little robotic thing move around it's a little bit mesmerizing but it's very important that it's able to test the balance but i guarantee you if you're getting still shaky footage this probably isn't the problem nine times out of ten it's not it is very rarely the problem once it is though done you should though see all the way across the board the screen that shows that tilt roll pan are all excellent so that's good we do know this is a very important thing to be able to test you don't have to test this every time you set up your gimbal as i showed here before powering it on i could see that it was very well balanced so let's click ok on that the next thing is once we're sure that it is very well balanced the first time setting up your camera and lens combination for this gimbal or when you change to another camera or lens combination you want to do a um an auto tune now this is very important it's one of the reasons i like to keep a lens married to a camera body so that i always have not just the balance numbers known of where i'm going to be but also that the gimbal has its auto tuned numbers and these are parameters that will help the gimbal adjust its motors accordingly as you are moving and you know panning the gimbal all that so what you want to do from the main screen as you go to main screen excuse me is go to motor parameters and then you'll see down here in the bottom and auto tune so once that's done it's going to shake the the gimbal a little bit it's going to do some other stuff like that and once it's done there's no rating on it it's just done and it sets the parameters accordingly and of course mine are already set on here from doing an auto tune no need to do that again waste your time while this thing just shakes in jimmy's but anyways a lot of tutorials on that and of course on dji's site as well so anyways that's important to have the next thing though that i want to make sure that really get across here is that those are kind of just your standard setup parameters right when you first get your gimbal the next thing is your user profile so from that main screen click on user profile and you're probably using if you're using a ronin-s or sc or rs you're probably using m2 you're using the middle user profile which is the default and if it by the way something goes wonky you look at what user profile you're using there's lights on the on the end over here make sure you are on the right profile that you think you're using so some of the things here is that i found very useful is that the follow speed i like to set to slow doing real estate uh videography i'm not doing a whole lot of action i'm not doing some crash and burn type of car movies i'm doing real estate videography very fluid slow motion type stuff the dead band is also at medium and that allows that when the camera finds its end point that it slows down accordingly so it doesn't all of a sudden jerk into place so a deadband medium usually works very well sometimes deadband low if you've got a very lightweight camera sometimes like for instance with some of the mirrorless stuff but i found it usually medium works very well on about everything and then sensitivity also to medium you can play around with those a little bit but for the most part i find those to be very good the push mode i like to have as push pan and tilt and that just allows me to then be able to still push the camera into a position or tilt the camera into position if i need to fine tune it beyond those but once i do that and i get it out of place you can double click the the trigger and it'll put it back into its place notice though at the very top of the screen here though is pan and tilt follow that means that as i'm doing this that the roll motor won't be actuated so there's only certain motors that will be allowed to move there's also pan follow which means that you're not going to get roll you're not going to get tilt you're just going to get panned if you use that though and it may seem like a real good shortcut for architectural photography real estate photography to maintain your verticals to be vertical it also means that you might get a little bit of upward down motion that will be too jittery because you're cutting off tilt and once you cut off the tilt motor then you don't have the ability for the tilt motor to start compensating for some of the other things so anyways that is some of the basics for the auto tune and the balancing there's also calibration which is very rare i didn't want to take a screenshot of that because it's a very advanced technique that you probably won't need to do at all that's only if something starts going wonky with your gimbal over time so you've got a new gimbal things aren't going well you shouldn't need to calibrate this at all but you can look into your user manual and find that for doing that the next thing though that could come up from this is that no matter what you're doing you're doing your ninja walk you've got all the uh you've got it balanced you've got it auto tuned but you're still getting some jitty jittery shaky footage well that could be a firmware problem so let's dive into that next [Music] so no matter what you've done you've still got some jittery footage next thing to do is to check and see if you might have a firmware problem dji has gotten lacks in my opinion on some of the uh firmware updates because they have new products so compared to just the s they've now got the rs they've got the sc and also crane does the same thing they start concentrating their firmware on the other products and they have a core base of software which basically what firmware is just on a device that's implanted there is that they will have those same components some of them will be shared across other devices for instance the ronin rs has different motor configuration stronger motors for more stability but that also then means with a lighter weight gimbal by the way also means that that could then affect an older product and not necessarily be all backwards compatible unless you're doing a lot of testing and really seeing what could be going on and especially nowadays a lot of cameras have that ibis the in-body image stabilization where if you have that on you might be getting the best of both worlds you have both the stabilization coming off your gimbal and then you also have stabilization coming from the camera itself from the sensor that though is cheating in a way you can do it if you want if you do that though what will happen is the in-body image stabilization can also jerk into place sometimes so i like to keep that off it's something i recommend in the book to keep off but a lot of people will keep that on and then they don't notice some of this other problem so let's take a look at two clips real quick and i'll show you is a frustrating thing for me as i had gotten another gimbal set up a whole new camera and i was doing some other work and i was realizing back and forth well wait a minute some of these jobs are definitely more jittery i'm a lot more experienced than this and then i've got these other jobs why are these so smooth then i sat down broke out a couple different cameras one was this setup here with the nikon uh the d750 with the lyowa 12 millimeter also took a newer nikon z6 also with a 12 millimeter lyowa without an adapter it was uh the z mount and then i used both ronin s's and i finally narrowed it down it was a firmware if you're able to prove it and there's other blogs that do talk about this as well so let's take a look first at these two clips to see what i'm talking about so we'll take a look here at the first clip here and this is where it was on a property i'm moving along and it's a little bit on the jittery side we can see that as i start moving i'm just not getting something very stable now i'm doing my ninja walk but look at this it's just not looking very stable it's looking like i'm almost just holding it with my hand and this is with the gimbal completely auto tuned so something definitely is not right we're going to revisit this particular clip too by the way in just a second now let's take a look at another clip and this was on a another job and this was at a horse ranch and this hasn't been slowed down or anything this is just me now moving down the hill and getting some smoother footage you look at those leaves you see that those leaves are just not jittery they're not moving it's butter smooth and i'm walking down a very cracked paved it's an old horse ranch and it's still though moving very well very fluid and very smooth as i walk past the stables not a problem this was definitely a big clue on what was going on so let's talk about what that actually means so the key here was the firmware version and it's something that you can change on any gimbal with an app dji has their own pro assistant app to do this and what you do is you plug in from your computer to the ronin usb c cable and then you start the app and it's a very simple process to do and ronin's always telling you upgrade the firmware upgrade the firmware all you have to do is just have your ronin on it has to be balanced has to be on because it needs to have the the ability to put the firmware in there so it has to be ready for that once you do though you're going to see this first screen it's a very simple application there's really not much to it so really all that you are going to see is just this first screen which if everything looks right you are going to see just you've got one selection you're connected to your ronin once you select that then you'll be able to see all the various firmwares that are compatible for now if you look at this particular layout you'll see that i have installed version 1.8.0 because it shows refresh then it shows all the ones above it that i could upgrade to so originally i had upgraded to version 2.4.1.30 hey this is great i've got a new z6 on here and everything uh let me get the latest firmware make sure everything is compatible well that's where things then went sour you can see though below that one version i have downgrade so you can select any of these downgrade options and downgrade to the firmware so i found just from going back and forth here that version 1.8.0.70 was the one that was very stable so that's the one that then i downgraded my gimbals to and everything then turned out very smooth so it's a very simple process to do this and of course ronin has instructions on their site for using their pro assistant app and you do this once again connected from your computer to the gimbal if something goes wrong you can always change back to another version of firmware and you can see how that goes but this is something that is just driving a lot of people nuts and you'll see in these forums people will say oh we need to do a ninja walk oh just to do a calibration oh all gimbals will give you some shake well that's just not true i've used gimbals for years and i've never seen that kind of shaky footage like i just showed you and sure enough by just downgrading the firmware i was able to then get something more stable so it'd be interesting to test this more with an rs with an sc by the way i did get an sc and it just didn't work very well for even my mirrorless setup it was just a little bit on the heavy side for it i felt the sc was more of a toy but if you do have the sc you can also try this as well not a big fan of it the rs is the big daddy though once again similar to the yes and that is something that i'll probably test later down the road i doubt the dji is going to look into that particular problem even though i've brought it to their attention just like for instance you might remember the godox problem i showed with the white balance issue and of course that goes nowhere after you go back and forth with the engineers you prove the problem they're interested in selling their newer products not coming back and revisiting some of their older stuff anyways that's a tangential thing aside don't mean to rant let's get on to the next issue though let's say that no matter what that you have some shaky footage you've got to fix it so something went wrong either you had too much coffee the gimbal wasn't auto tuned you didn't downgrade the firmware fine firmware that was very giving you smooth enough footage so what do you do let's take a look at that next [Music] so here's just that segment of footage i've got it over in premiere haven't done any slowing to it as you know i show some things on slowing this down to help get it buttery smooth in the book and i'll touch on that just a little bit here but first let's just take a look at this once again so i've got this segment of footage and you can see as i play it it just looks awful looks like i was holding an iphone or something and just hand holding something and just walking along it was terrible this is not i guarantee you once again i know the ninja walk i know how to get stable footage i've been doing this for a while this is not acceptable so what do you do very simple let's go back here to the very beginning of it and we're going to add warp stabilization so this is something you may have heard about or seen before all you do is you go up to effects and in effects go up here to the little search box and type in warp as you type in warp you'll see all of a sudden it comes in as warp stabilizer so what you do is you just drag warp stabilizer on to that clip now it's going to say some stuff here analyzing the background step one of two and this is taking a while because this particular clip is much longer than i would normally have this is going out to about 18 seconds so it's going to take a little while so anyways let me just cut right here and i'll come back and revisit this in just a second so that took about a process of a couple minutes and now you can see it's showing stabilizing now that that's done it's done stabilizing and you can hear now the fans on my cpu have have calmed down so there's less hiss in the background here now when i start playing that everything is a lot smoother so we don't have all that jittery footage it's now been smoothed out so a much cleaner cleaner looking uh product that we have here it doesn't work all the time so don't rely on it but it works very well most of the time so that's definitely another option another option you can do and this is something i recommend no matter what you realize if you have the book is that i like to shoot at 60 frames per second and then i like to post process on a 30 frames per second timeline so i have instructions step by step on how to do that maybe perhaps another video down the road a little bit lengthy here to cover on this topic but the idea is is that you get a bit more slow motion so the examples here that i showed were just straight out they were just one to one there wasn't anything slowed down on it but let's take a look though if we were to then slow that down even more so here is just 60 frames per second this is now on just 30 frames per second without any warp stabilization you can see that some of that has smoothed out it's really not so bad but now let's take a look at it with not just the 60 frames per second on a 30 frames per second timeline this is with the warp stabilizer added to and you can see we get especially very fluid motion coming out of it to get a very very smooth looking video so a lot of things could be going on once again make sure you balance make sure you auto-tune if you need to calibrate but i don't think you'd really have to do that check the firmware guaranteed there could be some type of problem if you're using a ronin-s you're from dji and you're using one of the newer firmwards downgrade that like i showed earlier the 1.8 version seems to be a lot more stable to that you can also then if you need to you can warp stabilize in post processing don't rely on it that's why i had to cut also that short it took just for that clip a couple minutes just to get the warp stabilizer on just that one clip too much time and post processing to keep relying on that and of course always shoot at 60 frames per second or more and then edit that on a 30 frames per second timeline so you get that nice fluid slow motion type of look anyways i hope this video was useful for you that you can use some of this in your real estate photography and videography career as well if you did like this video and you want to see more you can subscribe to my youtube channel it won't cost anything and as soon as one of these videos is posted you'll be the first to know thanks a lot for watching until next time take care be safe and get out there and shoot something

Channel: Nathan Cool Photo

Views: 62,032

Keywords: videography, gimbal, smooth footage, ronin, real estate, dji

Id: m80p1kOzx_Y

Length: 20min 49sec (1249 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021