Master your Hohem iSteady M6 - Hohem MIC-01 - Review & Tutorial

this is the video where you're going to learn everything that you need to know about the Hem I steady M6 gimbal as well I'm going to talk about using the Hem Mike 01 with and without this gimbal the iady m6 is one of my favorite smartphone gimbals for heavier setups in this full guide I'm going to take you from getting started with the gimbal all the way to more Advanced Techniques I'm going to getting set up using the home Joy app techniques to get the best from this gimbal hidden features and more even if you've never used a gimbal before this guide is for you there's been a lot of these wireless mics coming onto the market recently but the Hem mic 01 comes with some Innovative features the transmitter can take micro SD cards and it can also double as a Bluetooth shutter button this is the home I steady M6 kit and there's also a cheaper version which comes with less accessories firstly we've got the gimbal itself then there's the fill light with AI Vision sensor we got a mini tripod and there's two types of charging cable you got a manual and also a pretty cool looking case to carry everything in and I also have the H remote which doesn't come with this kit but I got it with a different gimbal I just wanted to show it to you but it actually works with the m6 and if you want one you can buy it separ the mic 01 box contains a very sturdy charging case two transmitters one receiver a charging cable two windshields and also a manual now there's lots of controls here we've got a lever a wheel buttons a trigger and so on but what do they all do let's have a quick overview before I go through and explain everything in more detail here we got the OED screen which provides various gimbal information the M here stands for for mode to use this to change modes below that is the zoom lever for controlling the camera's Zoom inside the zoom lever is the record or shutter button and so here we have the joystick and on the left side we have the control wheel for focus and roll next to the wheel we have a to B buttons which we can use to program automated movements on the right side we have the power button we have the USBC port for charging and a quarin minus 20 UNC port and there's two more of these one on the base and one on the rooll axis arm and by the way A4 in minus 20 UNC Port is a standard in photography and film making for things like tripods but here you can use them to attach other stuff too like microphones and lights so the/ quarter in refers to the diameter of the screw thread equivalent to approximately 6.35 mm and Theus 20 UNC part indicates the specific thread profile basically number of threads per inch turn the Gibble around and we have a trigger and a lock for the pan motor this is a 3axis motorized gimbal which means that there are three motors working to keep your smartphone stable we've got the pan AIS motor the roll AIS motor and the Tilt AIS motor at the top here is the AI Vision sensor which is detachable it's a magnetic Mount so it's easy to remove and replace and this is going to allow you to track a subject without using the h m finally on the Tilt arm by the clamp is a USBC output and you can use this to charge your phone using the gimbal's battery okay that's the overview so let's just get started first make sure the gimbal is fully charged to charge the gimbal connect the charging port on the side of the handle to a USBC adapter when it's charging the battery level kind of pulses back and forth but you'll know that it's fully charged when it stops and you'll just have all four battery level bars how long can we actually expect the battery to last absolute maximum is 18 hours but using various features adding extra weight to your phone for example if you can add lenses or filters or the phone not being exactly balanced all these things are going to reduce the battery life and as well if you use the fill light yeah it's the same as with your phone phone the more you ask it to do the faster the battery drains even so you can expect to get 6 to 8 hours from the battery charging the battery can take up to 3 hours if it's completely empty to activate the Gimbal and to use the extra features you're going to need to use the home Joy app so you can get this through the Google Play store or the Apple iOS store depending on your device once activated you can use your gimbal without the H app for example you can use all the gimbal modes modes just press the mode button to change mode and you can see on the screen which mode the gimbal is in using the AI Vision sensor you can track subjects without the home app but for many other features you need the app for example if you want to use the control wheel for Focus then you do need to use the app with bigger gimbals like the home I steady M6 you do need to invest a little bit more time mounting and balancing your phone compared to smaller foldup gimbals before mounting your phone make sure you unlock all the motors unlock the pan motor by pushing the catch down also now that you've unlocked it make sure that the motor moves freely unlock the roll motor by unclipping it from this little catch at the bottom of the motor the home iady M6 can carry phones up to 400 G and with a width from 58 to 988 mm the m6 can mount your phone two ways in horizontal mode and in vertical mode to switch between the two with this gimbal you do need to remount the phone with the screen of the gimbal facing you place the roll motor at the front the opposite side to the screen and now you have the Tilt motor on your right with the clamp in the middle and this clamp is going to twist depending whether you want to shoot horizontally or vertically so just twist it so that the phone is going to mount horizontally and when you mount your phone the back of the clamp should go against the back of the phone with the cameras facing away from you now just push the phone as far as it will go so the charging end is pushed up against the rubber pad here before you balance the phone make sure you've added everything that you want to add so if you're going to add a case filters microphones and even the AI Vision sensor anything like that it's going to affect the balance for now I'm just going to keep it simple and I'm just going to use the phone with the mic 01 transmitter to unlock the roll axis arm and then slide it back and forth until the phone is balanced now lock the arm in place if need be you can also adjust the position of the clamp Itself by pushing it up and down so just try to bounce the gimbal so that when you release the phone it doesn't suddenly kind of flop down to mount your phone vertically twist the clamp 90° and then just follow exactly the same process to rebalance and of course this time you probably want the cameras to be on the top but if you just want to quickly switch to Vertical without balancing you can move the handle so that it's horizontal with the OLED screen facing up the gimbal shed now hold the smartphone vertically now this is good for quick shots but if you're going to do a lot of vertical filming then I recommend that you use the first method to power on the gimbal long press the power button when you hold down down the button you're going to see the name home appearing and this tells you how long you need to hold the button you just keep holding until the name fully appears you'll also hear a ping noise and at the same time if you have the AI sensor and fill light attached then you'll get a flash from that as well to power off just long press again until you hear the Ping Again by the way once the gimbal is powered on a double press of the power button is going to put the gimbal into standby mode so it's usually a good idea to calibrate the gimbal before you start using it this is just to make sure the phone is positioned correctly so you can do this by placing the gimbal on a flat surface and then tapping the M button five times or in the app you can go to settings tap the gimbal button and scroll down to autocalibration it just takes a few seconds and if you find that even after running this calibration process your phone still isn't quite level on the the roll axis you can adjust this manually just above the auto calibration we have a roll adjustment setting so just tap the plus and minus buttons until the phone is level so a lot of people do ask me how I get these kind of nice smooth shots with the gimbal well one way is to make sure that the gimbal doesn't follow your movements too quickly I know that this sounds a little bit counterintuitive because you might think that when you start moving you want the gimbal to immediately stop moving as well not so because if you want your videos to look more like you're using a professional steady cam then you want your gimbal to ease in and out of the movements what you really want is that when you start moving the gimbal slowly sort of catches up with you and when you stop moving it takes a couple of seconds just to slow down and then it finally stops to me this just looks more professional so how do you get the home I steady M6 to do that what you need to do is to go into the joy app and go into settings and then just tap this little gimbal symbol and go to the follow speed and set that to slow and now when you move your gimbal as you approach your final framing you just need to stop a little bit before and let the gimbal slowly ease to a stop this does take a little bit of practice but I recommend that you spend some time and get used to this gimbal technique it definitely going to improve the look of your b-roll if you learn the skill now it can get a bit confusing when we talk about modes because there's modes in the app like video photo and time-laps and so on and these are what we might call shooting modes plus there's other modes as well to do with the control wheel but there's also modes which control how the 3axis motors work which are the basic gimbal modes so let's talk about those so when you press the M button the letters change as you change the mode so we have PF for pan follow in this mode the gimbal will follow your movements but only on the pan axis and then we have PTF which is for pan and tilt follow now the gimbal is going to follow your tilt movements and your pan movements next is L for locked mode in this mode the gimbal will not follow any movements po stands for point of view and in this mode the gimbal will follow all your movements on all three axes pan tilt and roll now if you're new to gimbals and you really want to master this device I've designed a 9-day practical course which is available to my video creator Pro members on patreon and I go through when and why to use each mode and of course much more than I can cover here in this video so just check the description I'll put a link there the home I steady M6 has a mode known as Inception mode to access this mode tap the mode button three times the gimbal now switches the angle of the smartphone and it starts to rotate so it does this automatically you don't need to do anything so to use this mode you need to aim the gimbal at your subject like you would a flashlight and to stop Inception mode just tap the trigger twice now if you want to adjust the speed of the rotation go into settings and gimbal settings scroll down to where it says ICP rotate speed and use the slider in fact anytime you want to recenter the gimbal just tap the trigger twice twice you're probably going to find that you use this a lot because while you're using the gimbal it's going to end up at funny angles and just tap the trigger twice and you're good to go in sport mode the gimbal Motors are tuned to react faster to your movements so normally like I say the gimbal moves slowly and this is good because it removes the shakiness of your hand movements but sometimes you might want the camera to react faster so in that case either Dismount your phone and film handheld or you can hold down the trigger and while you're holding it down the gimbal is going to be in sport mode then when you release it the gimbal goes back to the previous mode press the record button to start or stop recording or to take a photo so in theory you can half press the record button to focus the camera but I do find this doesn't really work too well it's much easier just to tap the screen but you can try it and see if it works for you maybe my fingers are just too clumsy double tap the record button to to switch between photo and video mode in the home Joy app and triple tap the button to switch between the front and rear camera the joystick is pretty straightforward press it up and down or left and right to move the gimbal now if you want to change the way the joystick works so that it moves in the opposite direction open the joy app tap the settings Cog tap the gimbal button and scroll down to the joystick settings and here you can reverse the direction and also change the speed of the gimbal when you use the joystick with the roll motor at the front using the ultra wide camera in our smartphone might result in the motor moving into frame and that's just going to kind of ruin the shot isn't it it's a problem that we often have with gimbals and as well if you're using an anamorphic lens having the motor in front is really bad news but with the home I steady M6 all you have to do is tap the trigger four times and the gimbal performs a little bit of magic and it brings the motor to the other side behind the smartphone now there's no chance of the motor getting to shot and we can create beautiful Smooth video trouble-free the control wheel has two modes Focus or roll press the wheel in twice to switch modes and the current mode is going to be indicated on the left of the screen in Focus mode you can now use the wheel to adjust focus and you're probably going to find that this works a little bit differently depending on your phone so I'm using the iPhone 15 Pro and when I try to focus I get a message that's telling me to turn off seamless zoom in the settings in the app I can toggle off seamless zoom and now when I turn the wheel the focus changes and I get a little Focus meter top left but actually I found that if I just switched to manual mode in the app this also allowed me to use the focus anyway personally I would only use this Focus wheel for Focus pulls and to do that you just set focus on one subject start recording use the wheel to move Focus until the second subject is in Focus if we double tap again we get into roll mode and in roll mode the wheel can adjust the roll angle of the phone the personally I really like this function because sometimes you want to adjust the angle of the phone and this is just a quick and intuitive way of doing it so there's actually another use for the control wheel if we press and hold the button down the light goes on on and with the light on you can control the light with the control wheel as well now on the left of the screen where it said roll or focus it now displays the light settings if we press the wheel three times we can switch between a CCT light or an RGB light the CCT light is more for adding light to a subject whereas the RGB light is more like a sort of colorful effect so in CCT mode below we can see the brightness level and below that is the temperature of the light in kelvin one tap on the wheel button switches between brightness and temperature so then we can just turn the wheel to adjust those settings in RGB mode below we can see the color of the wheel because RGB can be represented in a circle and this number represents the degrees of the circle so if you keep turning you're going to go through the entire RGB Spectrum below is the brightness again just turn the wheel to adjust and press and hold again to turn off the light a unique feature of the I study M6 is these A and B buttons on the handle and these allow you to program in a slow movement between two positions and one use for this is for a motion time lapse but maybe you want to use a different app you don't want to use the joy app say for example you want to use the iPhone's native camera app for the time-lapse part and then you want to use the gimbal to add the movement or you simply might want to shoot a panot and you also want to be in the shot another scenario for using this is that you might want to record a camera movement which has a perfectly smooth motion you know when we're moving by hand there's always going to be a little bit of a wobble even with a gimbal so to use this just move the gimbal to the first position long press button a until you get a ping sound use the joystick to move the gimbal to the second position and then long press again on the B button this time and when you want to start the movement just double tap the a button and once the gimbal is at the a position if you double tap the B button it will move back so you can go in either direction by default this movement is going to take one minute which is pretty short isn't it but you can actually change this in the app and the maximum duration is 1 hour so to change the duration of the movement go into settings gimbal settings and then this AB motion duration setting to use the AI Vision sensor to track your movement just attach it to the top of the gimbal motor like I say it's magnetic so it's easy to take it on and off so you just switch it on and then wait for the red light follow followed by The Fill light flashing twice to start tracking stand at least half a meter away and then make the okay sign with your hand the light will go green and the gimbal will now start to follow you around to stop tracking just show it the palm of your hand and actually you can turn this AI unit around so it can face both ways for example you might want to switch between front and rear cameras now you can actually adjust your position position in the frame using gestures make this gesture with your hands together sort of forming a u until the light blinks green and then move your position to where you want to be in the frame and then you just make that same gesture again and the light should stop flashing and the gimbal should now keep you in this new position in the frame a lot of people want to know which mic is the best to use with a gimbal could this new mic from from hem be the answer like when I got my hands on the I steady M6 I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised by the mic 01 features it really does tick a lot of boxes and it's also affordable the first thing is that you can attach a wired laalia mic to the transmitter and as well you can record directly onto the transmitter onto a Micro SD card having the micro SD card in here allows it to be used as a standalone recorder so I'm not connected to the phone I've just pressed record here and it's recording my voice and I'll sync it up with the video right now when I edit this because normally we have to buy one of the expensive DJI or Road setups to get these kind of features which is what I've actually done I have both the DJ and the road setups for that reason so the case has a USB C port for charging the case battery which in turn keeps the transmitters and the receiver charged the battery power in the transmitter and the receiver it said to last about 7 and 1/2 hours but when you combine it with the charging that you get from the case as well in total you're going to get about 20 hours of battery power so this is a setup it's designed to be used with smartphones but they can actually also be used with other devices this is the USBC version but you can also get a lightning version if you have an older iPhone and this setup is really simple to use so the setup it doesn't uh have all the features that you get with the DJI and the road mics of course because they're a lot more expensive uh but it's very simple you just take it out of the box it's a kind of plug and play you know e you take the transmitters and the receiver out of the box they automatically connect and uh you're ready to go the receiver also has a USBC pass through charging port so this means that you can still charge your phone with the receiver plugged in to use use it with the IED M6 just mount it as usual but this will move the phone further away from the middle so this might make adding extras like lenses and filters a little bit more tricky because all the weight is at the camera end so why might we want to attach a wired lalia to the transmitter if it already has a mic in it so there's two reasons really one is that you can put a better quality microphone uh and the second reason is that you can be a bit more discre with it so you can see here it's it's much more hidden amongst my clothes and you can even go further if you wanted to and actually hide it right behind the clothes like they do you know when they're making movies and stuff to use the transmitter as a standalone recorder insert a Micro SD formatted to the fat format so I saw One reviewer say that it can take up to a 32 GB card but in fact it can take bigger micro SD cards as long as they're formatted to the fat 32 format but even a 32 GB card can record up to 94 hours of wav format audio as a standalone recorder you just use the red button to start and stop recording the transmitter needs to be turned on you see it's off now so just long press the record button now it's on so it's flashing blue because it's not connected but it's uh and it's also not recording yet now I press record button there a little red button now it starts to flash blue and white so that means it's recording and then obviously to stop recording you just press it again so I often use mics like the DJI mic and the road mic most of the time I use them as a standalone recorder and then I just take the audio from the recorder and then I sync it to the audio of the video in the editing software and you can actually do that now in cap cut even if the transmitter is connected to the receiver and you have a micro SD card installed it's going to automatically record to the card as a backup so if something happens to the audio on your phone maybe you got a wrong setting sometimes the app doesn't recognize the microphone or you set it wrong somewhere you know you get back and you go oh it hasn't recorded the audio at least with this micro SD card you got this backup recording and you can fix the issue with that to transfer the files from the card you can take the card out and you can use a card reader or you can simply connect the transmitter to your computer using a cable you can even use the transmitter as a USB drive to store other files if you want so that's really got a lot of useful features here now one thing to note is that if the micro SD card gets full up it will start deleting all the old files so it will create new files and delete old files if it doesn't have enough space to store the new file once the setup is connected to your smartphone press the power button once want to start or stop recording or take a photo to mute the mic double press the power button noise reduction uses a computational process to separate the voice from any background noise and there's three settings we've got off standard and strong just single press the mode button to cycle through these noise reduction modes you get a blue light when it's off you get a green light for standard and yellow for strong so this is with standard noise reduction um so let's see how that sounds it's not particularly noisy here at the moment this is the highest level of noise reduction got a a van going past to test how it sounds the problem with noise reduction is often that it makes the voice sound a little bit synthetic right let's get back to the ey steady M6 so the remote is a separate purchase and this is one that I got a few years ago with another home gimbal to pair the remote with the gimbal first press the M button seven times then switch on the remote and they should automatically pair once paired the arrows on the remote now act as the joystick bottom left we have the record button start and stop recording or take a photo and this will actually work with any camera app not just the joy app as long as the gimbal is also paired with your smartphone via Bluetooth so this button acts just like the record button on the gimbal itself so you can also press twice to switch between photo and video mode and then press three times to switch between rear and front cameras and you can also tap the button bottom right twice to recenter the Gimbal and three times to enable Inception mode to unpair the remote from the I steady M6 tap the M button nine times so this is the iPhone version of the home Joy app and I'm using this version because it has all the features so if you're using an Android phone and you can't see a feature that's most likely because it doesn't exist in the Android version and before you write angry comments about home failing Android users the main reason why the Android apps for gimbals are worse than the iOS apps is really down to the makers of Android phones and not the app developers anyway let's talk about the app on the right hand side we have all the shooting mod modes Pano photo video time lapse slow motion and moment there's no buttons on the gimbal which switch shooting modes except for double tapping the record button to switch between photo and video which I explained earlier so we're going to need to tap the screen to switch Pano is a photo shooting mode which has five sub modes 3x3 180° 240° 360° and finally we have clone me and to use this mode you're going to need to place the gimbal on a flat surface or mount it to a tripod 3x3 takes nine photos and it stitches them all together to create a wideangle photo the three modes which are 180 240 360° shoot a panoramic photo says just like with our smartphone in panoramic mode where we move the camera to get a wider view but the advantage with using this gimbal is that it creates a perfectly smooth pan and as well using the gimbal you can be in the picture [Music] yourself clone me takes a number of photos from 3 up to seven and the idea here is that you can appear in each photo and then it stitches them together and it looks like well you know that you're hanging out with your [Music] clones photo mode is pretty much the same as video mode except you have a timer feature instead of resolution and frame rate so in video mode when you start recording you're going to see a pause button below tap this if you want to pause recording instead of stopping and then just tap again to restart in video mode we have the available resolution and frame rate settings in the middle on the left above we have exposure settings and by default it's in auto tap and Slide the EV setting if you want to keep the exposure in Auto but adjust the brightness up or down tap M to switch to manual mode now you can set shutter and ISO manually and these are actually two of the six key settings that you really need to understand if you want to master any kind of camera app and I've got another course which covers the six key settings which again is available to my video creator Pro members on patreon now if you want to adjust white balance which again is another of the key settings switch the joy app into manual mode then go into settings camera settings and tap white balance so there's a number of preset options we can scroll to the bottom tap customize and then we can set our own celvin number with a slider below resolution and frame rate we have the tracking settings while you can use the AI Vision sensor the app is also able to track you so there's two settings object object and face tracking with object tracking you need to draw a box around the object that you want to track if you switch to face tracking the app is automatically going to lock on to any face in the frame and then try to keep that face in the center of the frame when you're in face tracking mode you can also get the gimbal to take a picture as soon as it recognizes a face go into settings swipe down to centered Auto shoot and enable it now as soon as someone appears in the frame the gimbal locks on it does a little countdown and then it takes a photo and if you want to stop it tracking you in this mode I actually found the simplest way is really just to cover your face but as soon as it sees a face again it will start tracking again at the top we have this orange camera icon tap that to open up a storyboard guide so you can choose different scenarios and the app is going to give you inspiring shot and editing ideas choose a scenario and press start start and the app will Now guide you through each shot in detail press record and the red circle indicates the suggested shot length if you're happy press next and keep going through all the shots now when you get to the end you can preview all the shots edited together and if you like what you've created tap export and all your shots will be edited together into one movie now if you switch to manual mode you get this extra button next to the storyboard button and if you tap this you can switch between zoom and focus control but this isn't to do with the wheel this is to do with the zoom control the lever which is situated around the record button on the gimbal so this means that you can use this lever to control Focus as well as Zoom now if you want to change the speed of the zoom go into settings camera settings and scroll down use the slider to change the speed so this might actually be easier to use for Focus pulls so you can try both the lever or the wheel and just see which works best for you what does Seamless Zoom do this basically means the app is going to switch to the telephoto lens as smoothly as possible when you're recording next we have the phone's flashlight and it's just on or off and next to that we have the beauty filters so this is only available at 1080P and 30 frames per second or lower and here you can enable beauty mode use the sliders to adjust the look and also you can add color filters and the app has its own gesture control feature enable it and then you have three choices follow and shoot follow only or shoot only tap the question mark here to find out which gestures to use for which function beside the record button we have the camera picker on my iPhone 15 Pro I have regular wide I've got Ultra wide and I've got the three times Cel photo tap them to change the camera and you can also use the zoom lever above the record button we have the selfie camera switch button below the record button we have the gallery button tap to open the gallery and then use the video and photo tabs to find your media and this actually also includes media that you've captured without using the joy app so unfortunately it's kind of locked in this vertical alignment so that does make viewing your media when your phone is mounted horizontally not the best experience but at least when you tap a photo or a video it switches to the correct alignment for viewing top right we have four meters or indicators first plus the Bluetooth icon tells you whether your phone is connected to the gimbal via Bluetooth next we have the current gimbal mode then we have the gimbal's battery level and next to that we have the phone's battery level tap the settings Cog to open up more settings uh to control the camera and the gimbal first we have photo aspect ratio below we can mirror the selfie camera so choose the option you prefer here now if you want to add a guide you can choose that below you can either have a cross a diagonal or a grid and apart from that I think I've either covered the settings already or it's pretty self-explanatory in time-lapse mode you can shoot a stationary time lapse or a moving time lap otherwise known as a motion lapse first choose the shutter interval and you can go up to one frame every 10 seconds next choose the duration that you want the I steady M6 to spend capturing the time lapse and if you leave this at No Limit it's going to keep going until you stop it now if you want a moving time lapse move the gimball to the first position using the joystick press the plus button move to the next position and press the next plus button and so on up to five different points but personally I would only shoot a time lapse between two positions when you're ready just press Start uh I would recommend that you lock exposure when you're doing a time lapse so to do that you just tap and hold on the screen and you see this little message that pops up saying focus and exposure locked although it does disappear quick not much to say about slow motion mode but you can change the resolution and frame rate on the left on my iPhone 15 Pro I can go up to 240 frames per second at 1080P and finally we have moment mode and this mode contains various different effects and editing templates so some of them are a little bit like the storyboard feature that we already looked at but there's time with effects added or some graphics or editing Styles and text and others are just like one shot effects like Dolly Zoom Inception motion laps and that kind of stuff so just swipe through and see if you find anything you might find useful or maybe just fun to try out

Channel: Simon Horrocks

Views: 36,659

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Id: QCg5sHXKPkE

Length: 36min 50sec (2210 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2024