(gentle music)
- I can't believe I'm actually doing this.
You know, there's a reason why
from about December to about the end of February,
all my videos are inside
and that's because I live in Canada.
(inspirational music)
And in Canada, it's pretty cold during those times.
But for this particular video,
I kinda need some space to be able
to move around and do the proper tests.
Look at me mom, I'm a YouTuber.
But why the heck am I putting on all these layers?
Why are we going outside today?
Well, a little while ago,
there was kind of this insurgence
of people talking about gimbals.
"Do I need a gimbal?
Do I need a gimbal if I have IBIS?"
all of those kinds of questions
coming flooding in left and right,
and for a while it was quiet.
And then, DJI decided to release a couple of new gimbals,
and now again, I'm getting all these questions.
"Do I need a gimbal?
Do I need a gimbal if I have IBIS?"
So today, and the reason that I'm getting all bundled up,
is because we're gonna be taking the Ronin RS2,
and we're gonna be heading outside
to compare it to all those different kinds of stabilization
and see what you really need.
Let's go because I am sweating now.
(gentle music)
(feet crunching)
Okay, so here's the deal.
I wanna do three different tests
at four different levels of stabilization,
a walking test, your running test,
just kind of stable shot.
And the four different levels of stabilization
are going to be standard,
which is just like the regular IBIS inside of the a7S III,
the active one,
Catalyst Browse, which we'll also get to see
what it looks like with stabilization off,
and then we're going to use the gimbal.
But I need to find somewhere to do this
where they'll actually be able to see
whether things are stabilized
and not just a giant, white emptiness, okay.
Get a load of this guy.
It's cold outside, sure, but it's not that cold outside.
And here's the thing,
I can already tell you what's gonna happen,
or at least I think I have a pretty good idea.
So I think what we'll do,
we'll turn this into a bit of a game.
I'm gonna give my predictions of what I think
is gonna happen with the test footage that he gets,
and what I want you to do is pause the video now,
head down to the comments section
and make your own predictions as well.
Remember, we've got three different categories
and then we've got four different levels of stabilization.
So head down, make your predictions
and we'll see if they match up with what happens.
I think the gimbal is gonna crush on walking and running,
I don't think that IBIS
is any kind of a replacement for a gimbal,
but I am very excited to see
how the active and Catalyst Browse hold up
to those situations.
If the regular IBIS is anything like previous Sony cameras,
it doesn't really do a whole lot
in those kinds of situations.
But hopefully active will do a little bit more
and hopefully Catalyst Browse
will even take it one more step further
because we have more control to crop in more
and kind of fine tune it.
And then as far as the standing still shots,
I think all of them are going to be just fine.
I don't think it's necessary to use a gimbal
if you're just doing a fairly steady shot, pun intended,
but it doesn't hurt, necessarily.
All right, so those are my predictions,
hopefully you already left a comment
letting me know what your predictions are.
Let's get back to this goofball and let him do his thing.
There we go, a bunch of trees, that should do the trick.
All right, so I'm gonna shoot all the gimbal ones first
because I'm already set up and ready to go on the gimbal.
So it's the a7S III in a SmallRig Cage
with the G Master 16-35 F2.8,
and we're gonna shoot the tests at 24 millimeters.
(gentle music)
(feet crunching)
(gentle music continues)
All right, camera is off the gimbal,
we've got all our gimbal shots
so now we're gonna shoot
with the different levels of stabilization just in-camera.
So first we're gonna start with just the standard IBIS.
(gentle music) (feet crunching)
And now we're gonna move on to the active stabilization
that you'll find in the ZV1, a7C and a7S III.
(gentle music) (feet crunching)
And lastly, I'm gonna shoot with stabilization off
so we can see what it looks like with no stabilization,
as well as using Catalyst Browse to stabilize in-post.
(gentle music) (feet crunching)
Okay, so I just got the footage back from doofus here,
and we've got to put a couple of clips
through Catalyst Browse to get our stabilized footage.
If you've never used Catalyst Browse before,
here's kind of how it works.
Basically, you're gonna find your clip
and you're gonna hit Stabilize clip.
It's gonna analyze it.
And off the bat, it starts in auto stabilization,
so it tries to decide how much cropping it needs,
to make it as stable as possible.
I find that usually Catalyst Browse
goes a little bit overboard on it,
so we can usually back it off just a little bit.
Then when you're done, you can export it and change the name
so that you know which one is the stabilized version.
And then we can pull that in and check it out.
Okay, so having a look at this footage here
for the walking and running tests,
the gimbal is by far the best option.
The normal standard IBIS
is not much better than having IBIS off altogether.
Active stabilization is actually quite impressive
in this case, even in the running one.
It's a little bit jerky,
but there aren't any kind of weird artifacts
or anything like that, so I'm really impressed there.
And then Catalyst Browse
is actually kind of a surprise for me,
but not in a good way.
Every time I take a step, we get this crazy motion blur,
which, since you have to turn off
in-body image stabilization, to get Catalyst Browse to work,
kind of makes sense,
'cause we're not stabilizing any of those footsteps.
So then you get the motion blur
and as much as Catalyst Browse can smooth it all out,
you're still seeing every step in the form of motion blur.
And I know some people are gonna say,
"Well, if you just crank up your shutter speed,
then that might help with that."
But I mean, that's a compromise that I don't know
that I would be willing to make in every situation.
Changing the shutter speed,
changes the way that things look,
changing the shutter speed changes the exposure.
I mean, it is there as an option, potentially,
but I am kind of disappointed
in how it turned out with Catalyst Browse.
Now we did have a little bit of a problem
with the standing still shots.
He only shot these tests at 24 millimeters.
And we're gonna shoot the tests at 24 millimeters.
And when you're shooting that wide,
it's not gonna be very obvious,
all these little differences
between handheld and gimbal and stabilized and not,
it gets more evident as you shoot more zoomed in.
But the bigger problem is that this guy thought
it would be a good idea
to take those standing still test shots
of a wobbling branch.
So it's tough to know whether he's wobbling
or the branch is wobbling.
It's, I'm gonna have to get him to get some new stuff.
(phone ringing)
(phone rings)
Hello.
Hey, that footage that you got me, it's not gonna work.
Can you grab me standing still at 24 and at 70 millimeters
so that we can compare?
And do it of something that's standing still,
no wobbling branches.
You're so needy, you know that?
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.
Fine.
Okay, he said it'd be over right away.
(clock ticking)
(bell dings) Okay, so now
that we have enough footage to actually make this happen,
looking at these standing still shots is really interesting.
I would actually argue that the gimbal is worse
than some of the handheld shots.
The gimbal kind of has
this little bit of swaying going on in it,
it's nice smooth swaying, but it's swaying, nonetheless.
I was actually a little bit surprised to see
how shaky the footage was at 24 millimeters
with no stabilization on at all.
I thought at that wide,
it would be a little bit more stable,
but apparently I drink too much coffee.
The regular standard in-body stabilization did a great job.
It definitely makes a big difference
over no in-body stabilization.
Then when you jack it up into active mode,
of course you get your little bit of a crop,
but it makes a huge difference.
There are points in there
where it looks like it's almost a tripod shot.
And then I thought Catalyst Browse also did a great job,
pretty similar to what we're seeing in the active.
Because we don't have that walking,
we don't have that motion blur from each step,
we're not getting the issues
that we were seeing in the previous tests.
And then when we zoom in
and we look at these 70 millimeter shots,
this is where we can really see the minute differences.
No stabilization at all, looks absolutely terrible,
I really need to think about my caffeine intake.
Standard IBIS does a great job in this instance.
If I needed to put that shot in something,
I would be really happy with it.
Active stabilization, I didn't find
to be that big of a difference
over the regular stabilization in this case.
And then Catalyst Browse on this one,
maybe just because we're zoomed in more,
I do see a slight amount of that motion blur problem
that we were seeing
when we were doing the walking and running tests.
Which means that my hands are actually shaking enough
to cause little bits of motion blur
and because we have the in-body stabilization turned off,
there's nothing we can do about it.
The motion blur is already there.
Whereas when we use the active mode,
we're kind of combining both the in-body stabilization,
the actual sensor shifting,
and a little bit of digital stabilization on top of that.
And then of course the gimbal at 70 millimeters
kinda has the same thing
that I was seeing at 24 millimeters.
We've got that little kind of like wobble going on.
Pretty much like I predicted,
the gimbal outdid everything else
on the running and walking tests.
Catalyst Browse was actually
a big disappointment in that category,
and active stabilization on the newer Sony cameras
is actually quite impressive.
Still not gimbal-like, but impressive, nonetheless.
If you want a smooth running or walking shot,
you're gonna need that gimbal.
And I do highly recommend the DJI RS2, fantastic gimbal.
Big shout out to Moment
for supplying that for this comparison.
When it comes to the standing still shots,
I actually preferred handheld over the gimbal
because we had less of that wobble.
I found it a little bit easier to control
what the shot was gonna look like.
Unfortunately, out of all this,
I think the biggest thing that I've learned is
that Catalyst Browse is not really
all I thought it was gonna be.
I had really hoped
that it could kind of be that thing where,
if you had that, you wouldn't necessarily need the gimbal.
I don't really like setting up a gimbal
and tearing it down and all that kind of stuff.
But luckily, on this gimbal specifically,
they've made it really easy,
so I can stop whining about that.
Just like our friend there should stop whining
about how cold it is.
Anyway, that's my take on the whole thing.
Let me know what you think down in the comments
and on your way down there,
make sure to hit that like and subscribe button
and that bell notification, if you don't want to miss out
on future reviews and tutorials.
Thanks again to Moment for supplying the RS2,
thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.
Think that IBIS is any kind of a replacement for a gimbal?
But I am very, but I am very excited to see what...