Should you still buy the Rhino Arc II in 2020?

how's it going everyone david from dod media in the start of 2020 i was looking at upgrading my motion slider system from the 2d motorized slider that i reviewed previously it's the gbm 80 qd which features that track and pan rod in the middle now i stand by that is a great inexpensive way of getting your feet wet with a motion slider system but i was starting to want more control over the different features of the slider and i wanted to be able to add tilt to it as well which the adqd did not do so i started looking at more advanced way way more expensive 3d motion slider systems meaning slider system that can slide back and forth but that can also pan and tilt with far more control and precision over the start and end points and the degrees of rotation and tilt now i won't bore you with the arming and eyeing that i experienced um just doing a ton a ton of research um between a dozen different motion slider systems um and the hours and hours of youtube reviews that i watched especially you know for my needs it came down to two options really the first option was the edelkrone slider system with the head plus now this is a very popular slider system i know there are a large number of content creators who use it and i used to use edelkrone's first gen slider one so i know that edelkrone's quality is top-notch but so is their price tag even with a 15 bundle discount i'd be looking at about three thousand dollars to get the bundle that i wanted which is not even the most expensive one now given that that's a thousand percent more than what i paid for the gvm 80 qd i was a little reluctant so then the next option down was the rhino arc 2 system which i'd also heard great things about and you know caleb pike from dslr video shooter did a great review on it um gerald undone did a fantastic comparison between the r2 and the edelkrone system and ultimately that ended up playing a large factor in why i chose to go with rhino over edelkrone so in terms of my decisions for parts to get i decided to go for the 42-inch slider because i found that the the inch i've had a 24 inch slider before and it's always felt a little bit short for me um for interviews for product stuff it i don't have to use all 42 inches but it's nice to have the option um so i got the 42 inch version and then i got the high speed motor not the high torque motor the high speed motor is really designed for interviews and talking heads because it operates quietly whereas the high torque motor is more for time lapse and feature movements where absolute silence is is not necessary so that's why i went for the high speed motor and then finally the arc 2 head which kind of acts as the brains of the entire thing now i'm just going to say this straight up because this video will otherwise seem rather negative this is an incredible system i i have never used something as advanced and as cool as this it is really awesome but this video is about some of the shortcomings some of the things that it boasts on paper but actually it doesn't quite deliver on in reality so i just want to pre-empt the next like 10 minutes of this video by saying this is not a video meant to trash talk the r2 or rhino as a company as a brand it's a fantastic system and it is unparalleled for its price it allows me to make some fantastic movements camera movements that otherwise without this system i would really struggle to do i don't know how i would do them but there are some definite things about it that i hadn't known or thought of when i decided to buy it which now if i were looking back at buying this kind of system again after half a year some of these things might give me pause the biggest one of these is the battery now the idea behind having an inbuilt battery i get it it's to minimize the amount of kit you need to take with you um you don't have to worry about you know forgetting to charge your batteries because you just have to remember to charge this whole unit and it will power your whole slider i get that and it's designed as a travel slider so yeah i get the inbuilt battery but the problem i have with that is that there's no way for me to change that battery which means that ultimately i have a limited life span with this unit before the cells become so terrible at holding charge that they won't even hold the charge for one interview and yes you can power it with a ac dc adapter but that's kind of not the point of having a battery powered unit is it and i've already noticed that uh the battery doesn't charge to 100 anymore i got this in january february it doesn't charge to 100 anymore it blinks at about 90 and doesn't go beyond that so how long it will last in totality that's anyone's guess um the other thing is that it's a 60 watt hour battery which isn't anything to be sniffed at sure but for context um this is a 75.6 watt hour 7.2 volt battery it cost me 60 quid combine two of these and you would have enough voltage to power this unit and plenty of watt hours plenty of wattage anyway to to power it for at least twice as long as a full charge of this normally would for 120 quid of batteries so i would love to see someone take this apart actually and remove the battery cells and replace it with some kind of power plate that you can put two of those npf style batteries on and see you know just see how much better it operates because that would give far more longevity to this if you have batteries that can be replaceable for such an expensive piece of kit i kind of feel like that would be a very nice feature to add the other thing that gives me pulls is the speed at which rhino develops its firmware now there are features on the app that have said coming soon since the product launched there's still no hint of those even becoming available when they might become available no one knows there are lots and lots of promises and very few of them have been delivered on so it's not it's just not able to do everything that it says on paper yet and it's been out for a year already and that causes some concern for me now saying that rhino have just released a new firmware for it a few months ago version 1.05 and i believe kyle from rhino said in that video announcement um that they now had a firmware team dedicated to working on the firmware of this unit so it's not just a tiny tiny group of people which i mean rhino is a tiny company um it's not just that tiny group of people anymore they have a team of people dedicated to working on the firmware but still until it actually gets delivered there's no there's no promise right there's no there's no fulfillment of that promise so unreliability as far as product feature development goes that's a big issue for me and the third thing that i've got to say i really dislike about the slider or the head specifically is that the 501 mounting plate is not centered over the head's axis of rotation which is here in the center of the caddy this means if you use a tripod plate the way you're meant to the way that 99 of people do your camera sensor isn't going to be above the center of rotation of the slider caddy now to me that's not only a weight dispersion issue but it's also an alignment issue when it comes to distance between start and end points of movement let me show you what i mean with this animation this is the slider with the r2 set up on top and a camera mounted to that using the mounting thread where it's typically found on a camera which is in line with the lens now if the camera is pointing out while the slider moves and the r2 doesn't rotate it's not a problem but if you decide to rotate your arc at 90 degrees like so well suddenly the camera doesn't sit directly above the slider it's slightly offset which means the weight offset is to the left of the arc too now this probably hopefully won't affect your shoot in any way but if you're using a heavier camera system you may well find that it does and it's going to add unnecessary weight and balance offset to the head and it's going to make the motors work harder okay so now let's imagine that i'm doing a tracking shot where my subject is stationary so for example an interview talking head situation i set up my keyframes start and finish and now when the movement is happening i can see that the sensor is physically closer when it's on the left of the slider than when it's on the right again this is not something you should notice hopefully but i suspect if you're doing some macro work with a probe lens you might need to actually change the rotation of the slider a little bit to compensate for that and you'd have to eyeball it which kind of gets rid of the whole point of being able to do these precise movements if you then have to eyeball stuff but like i say it's probably not even something that you would affect most users um but to me it's a short sight in the design process i just find a little bit a little bit disappointing i mean maybe i'm missing something maybe there's a reason why it's like this but i can't think of any and the only thing i can think of is that it's offset to be able to give access to these controls which is really really not all that clever because the controls could have been built on the side and have the 501 plate where it's meant to be and then the final thing that drives me a little bit nuts is the app control is currently available only for ios which means android users like myself tough luck development for an android version seems way down their priority list um i mean so far down that i i've not seen an update on it since this has come out now i'm not holding out any hope for it either because they've really put a lot of focus on their ios app and i do find that a lot of companies tech companies their ios apps work really well uh better than the android versions usually so i've actually repurposed my wife's old iphone 6s and turned it exclusively into a studio gear control tool but it would be nice to not have to buy another device or use another device to control your gear it'd be nice to use the one that you have that has an internet connection that has data that has all of your stuff on it it just makes sense so like i said those those are the things i'm not so hot on about this slider system but but now let's have a look at what i do feel uh made this the right choice for me the movements are buttery smooth there's no other way to say it i mean that's why you use a slider right to get buttery smooth smooth smooth movements i've read in scene accounts um online about micro jitters not just for rhino actually edelkrone has more people complaining about micro jitters than rhino does and i don't know if it's uh you know flaws in their gear or if they're not balancing their their cameras properly but for my part i've not had any any micro jitters whatsoever i'm not using an overly heavy cinema rig but even actually using my blackmagic pocket cinema camera 6k with the big fat chunky sigma 14 to 24 um prime zoom lens i don't notice any jittering whatsoever um and the only way to prove that to you is to show you so here is a little montage of clips from around the studio to show you just how smooth this is [Music] so [Music] so do [Music] so now another factor that made me favor this one over the edelkrone system was cost as i said in the beginning the edelkrone would have cost around 3200 after tax whereas the arc 2 cost me about 2 200. i mean that's that's a that's a thousand bucks that's almost 50 more and now considering like the battery issue and all of that um it is the age-old dilemma of you know capital versus long-term payoff um i don't know if in three years i'd be saying that i'd recommend this over the adult prone if the battery's crapped out there's no way to say but i think for that 50 extra i savings i'm willing to to chance it um hopefully i'll regret it in a few years hey um editor david here just jumping in because i realized that i i kind of skirted over a lot of the stuff that's actually really good that i enjoy about this slider um i kind of got focused on the negative and there are a few things that i forgot to mention when recording that video initially that to me make this a much better slider than the edelkrone the first thing is these little wing nuts here that you use to mount it to a tripod and the fact that you've got a central one which you can turn and secure it down or you've also got two on the sides here and that to me is a massive massive benefit because it means really really good easy to access stability for when you're mounting this slider either centrally on one tripod with a little extension arm down the end like i've done here or if you're mounting it on two tripods um in either of these further out kind of two-thirds attachments with the nuts the fact that they've included those wing nuts on both sides there as well really really nice touch but then if you want to attach it all the way to the ends you can as well because it has a 3 8 and quarter 20 thread underneath there on both sides so you could use a light stand or like i've got this this kind of extension arm with a clamp on the end that extends out and it's really good then if you're just using one central tripod to then use both of these arms or just even one arm to brace it against the floor makes a big difference and another factor that made me choose this slider over the edelkrone where it kind of it has this system that allows you to extend beyond that length of the slider as it is the problem is you'd have to lie your tripod legs down as as flat as they can go really or almost as flat as they can go to get that added reach on the legs for stability and you're still going gonna get a little bit of bowing when the camera is at either end which some people say it doesn't bother them i mean i i don't know how it can't bother you bothers me and the final thing that i wanted to add that i really like about this is that it's a tool-less system meaning that apart from the somewhat cheesy unnecessary um beer opener that they've included underneath the 501 plate mount uh you can mount the motor with the thumb screws you can mount tripods or light stands using these wing nuts you don't need any tools to assemble this slider which is really nice when you're out in the field now i mentioned this is a little cheesy this is used basically to really secure this down after you've used the auto mount system that's in the arc ii you secure it down wedging this as a lever or a lever however you want to pronounce that personally i kind of feel like they could have used just like an allen key that pulls out and you turn that and then you push it back in and that way you never lose it but they wanted to have a beer opener in there i'm sure there are people who are delighted that they can open a beer now that they have bought this expensive slider i'm not one of them but my point is that it is a toolless system which is really good okay i want to hear the rest of what he had to say so the big question is is it still worth buying a rhino arc 2 system in 2020. um i would say that if what i've discussed as cons in this video don't concern you or that you're willing to live with those those points of concern that i raised well then it's a fantastic piece of kit that you will love using and that you will get some phenomenal footage from um however if it's not something that you can let slide no pun intended uh if it's not something you can let slide um then i would suggest looking at something like the edelkrone system um even though it's more expensive or check out axio.com they're going to be going on kickstarter soon and that's a pretty ambitious looking modular system for 3d camera movements that i'm i'm definitely gonna enjoy uh checking out once it's live so yeah check that out if after watching this you have decided that you would like the r2 system then you could uh you could consider buying it using the link in the description it's an affiliate link so it won't cost you anything extra but it will give me a little cut of that sale so that i can help support this channel to make more gear reviews for filmmakers and photographers keep it going all right give it a thumbs up if you liked what you saw hit that subscribe button ring that bell and i'll see in the next one [Music] cheers [Music] you

Channel: DOD Media

Views: 6,744

Keywords: dodmedia, dod media, rhino arc ii, rhino arc 2, rhino camera gear, motorized slider, edelkrone vs rhino arc ii, rhino arc ii review, rhino arc ii vs edelkrone, edelkrone vs rhino 2020, rhino arc 2 vs edelkrone, rhino slider arc ii, rhino camera gear arc ii, video production for beginners, rhino arc ii footage, rhino arc ii test, rhino arc ii slider, rhino arc 2 price, rhino arc 2 firmware update, best camera sliders 2020, rhino slider arc 2, arc ii rhino, arc ii review

Id: yw9tmLDzMq0

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020