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- What's up, everyone?
Welcome back to another video.
Today, we're talking all about this thing here,
which is the Easyrig Vario Five.
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Now this is a camera system that takes the weight
of these heavier cameras off your arms
when you're doing handheld work,
and distributes that weight onto your waist.
That's essentially all it does.
A lot of people have the misconception that
this Easyrig stabilizes the footage.
Now it does in some respects,
which we'll look at once we get the camera all rigged up,
but essentially all it is doing
is just distributing that weight onto your waist
so that it frees your arms up
to be able to control the camera in a really nice way.
It's not rocket science when it comes to putting it on.
Essentially all you're doing is just putting it on
like a camping backpack.
So all you want to do is loosen up all of the straps,
and then hold the top here and just slide it on.
It's nice to be able to hold it as you're putting it on,
because this does swing around and you can hit things.
The first thing that you want to do
is make sure that these shoulder straps are nice and loose.
So you want it sitting quite low onto your waist.
And then what you want to do is just tie
the waist strap up, and make sure that that
is nice and snug on your waist.
So at the moment, all of the weight is on my waist.
You can see I've taken the shoulder straps off,
and it's still supporting the Easyrig all right.
Then you want to tighten these shoulder straps down,
and then under the arm there's also another strap,
which you can tighten.
And lastly, we're going to put this top strap on.
So now that we have all the straps on,
we essentially just want to check that it's nice and snug.
So I'm going to pull down here on this right now.
And if I pull down quite tight
and there's no movement in the waist
down here on the Easyrig, then it's nice and snug.
So this is the Easyrig all set up.
Essentially what we have is a boom arm
that swings out in front of your head.
Now this boom arm here can be raised or lowered
depending on the type of work that you want to be doing.
I like to have it quite close to my head,
because I am six three, and I find that this height
is plenty high enough for the majority of shots that I want.
But if you're a shorter person,
you can definitely raise this up.
The other thing is having this boom arm close to the head
when I'm moving in and out of doorways
and walking around tight spaces.
I'm much more aware of where this is in relation to my head,
so I'm less likely to catch it on things.
So we have the boom arm, and then obviously
we have this piece here that connects
to the camera directly.
Now when you order your Easyrig, you can get
a whole lot of different attachments for the camera.
We've opted for the quick release ball joint.
And essentially you just have a ball joint attachment,
and this ball joint can attach to your camera,
or different types of equipment.
And this simply just quick releases straight into there.
So quick release, really simple.
If I want to release it, I just pull here,
and that detaches beautifully, just like that.
Now on this quick release ball joint,
we have what we call a frog hook.
And this frog hook is what we use to attach to
the eye hooks on the camera.
(hook clicking) So that goes in there,
and then simply we open up the frog hook,
this pulls down, and this will attach directly
onto the camera.
What I also have on the camera as a second eye hook,
but then I also have a D-ring here,
which is on a safety harness.
So worst case scenario, if the camera falls off
or this separates and breaks off,
then this safety is going to hold the weight of the camera.
Now I don't see a lot of people using the safety strap
on the Easyrig.
I like to use it because of the type of work that we do.
We do a lot of outdoor stuff, a lot of vehicles,
a lot of boats, all that sort of stuff.
And if I'm shooting off the side of a boat
down at the `water, the last thing that I want to happen
is one of the hooks to break off,
and I lose the whole rig.
Now when setting up the camera,
basically what you want to do is make sure
that it's nice and balanced.
So we want the tilt and the roll of the camera
to be perfectly centered, so that
we don't want to be putting any weight
into the camera with our hands.
So if we take our hands off and let it just hang,
we want the natural weight of the camera
to be nice and balanced.
Oftentimes when it's not balanced properly,
all of the shots might be slightly rolled to one side,
and that just creates extra work in post to correct that.
So make sure that it's nice and balanced.
And because we have a nice and balanced starting point
with the camera, every time we put energy into this rig
with our hands, we're intentionally doing it
to control the shot and the angle
that we want with the camera.
Everyone likes to rig their cameras out differently
when it comes to the Easyrig,
but essentially I've just left it quite open.
I've got this side handle here
where I can hold it as a shotgun at waist height,
but I also can simply just hold the battery here,
or hold the top if I want to control the rig
left and right.
Now I should be able to control the camera
in any angle that I want just with one hand,
and that frees up this left hand to pull focus.
Now, if the camera's at maximum height all the way up here,
I like to hold it underneath
to control the movement of the camera.
But likewise, I could also just grab the grip up here
if I need to get a tilt.
So there's lots of different ways you can hold the camera,
and the more you build out your own camera,
you'll get the feel for where it's comfortable.
Some people like to put an extension arm here
and have like a pistol grip up here
to control the movement of the camera.
But the main thing is that you just rig it out
so that you're comfortable,
and the types of shots that you want to capture,
are nice and simple with the way
you've built out your camera.
The one thing I will mention about this rig
and the reason we went for the eye hooks
and the frog hook connection, is that it allows
the tilt of the camera,
so up and down, to tilt really smoothly,
because it's simply just rolling on the eye hook there.
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And the other thing that you can also do quickly
with this setup because of the two eye hooks,
is grab the main line here,
open up the frog hook,
and then connect it to the back eye hook.
And then we're just going to grab our safety,
and put it on the front.
And now I have a camera that's weighted to be tilted down.
So it's naturally tilting down,
which allows me to get all of those shots looking down
without having to overly strain the camera.
So you can see nice, easy tilt down.
Particularly if you're looking down at a subject
or if someone's doing some work with their hands,
it's nice to jump up around them
and just get some angles like this.
Okay, so this is the basic Easyrig set up with the Ursa G2.
I can tell you now that this is really comfortable.
I'm not having to strain at all holding this camera.
I've got a lot of movement and a lot of flexibility
in terms of where I can point this camera.
It's really comfortable on my back.
There's no niggles or anything.
So I can say at the end of the day,
my back and my shoulders are really fresh.
Where you will feel it eventually is your legs,
obviously because your legs
are actually carrying the extra weight.
But at the end of a long day,
I'd rather feel it in my legs than in my back.
So the Easyrig is definitely a great investment
for your career if you're a camera operator
shooting long days, and wanting to protect your back.
One thing that I do love about using the Easyrig
on a long shoot day is all of these extra pockets
that you have.
For example, I've got some spare batteries here
in this pocket, I've got my phone in this pocket.
You could have a call sheet or just a bunch of snacks,
bunch of tools for the camera, all sorts of things,
especially if you're moving around
for a documentary style shoot, which we do a lot of.
This was just a really great system
to have you sit for the whole day.
I can walk around a big facility
just holding the camera like this,
and I'm more than comfortable having this setup
for a three to four hour period.
All right, so let's go back to the idea
that the Easyrig is actually a camera stabilizer.
It's not a stabilizer, because there's no active motors
combating the camera shake.
But the thing that the Easyrig allows you to do
is attach really heavy camera rigs,
and by nature, those heavy camera rigs
have this pendulum type effect.
And so all of the micro jitters that you'll find
in a lot of lighter, handheld camera work
is the fact that the shake from your hands
is introduced into the camera,
but that you don't really get that with an Easyrig
and a heavy camera.
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So there you have it, this is the Easyrig Vario Five.
And this is for camera packages
between seven and 15 kilograms.
If you have a lighter camera,
there is an Easyrig MiniMax.
I personally owned the MiniMax,
but I sold it soon after I bought it
just because of the weight limitations.
So if you can afford it from the get go,
I'd definitely recommend the Easyrig Vario Five,
just because it's a much more robust setup.
We've had the setup for about two years now,
and I can honestly tell you we've used it
every single week that we've had it,
and it's never let us down once.
Everything on it feels really strong and sturdy.
The stitching on the unit and everything that goes with it
feels really high-end and high quality.
So highly recommended it
for any type of handheld cinema work,
particularly for run and gun doco style work.
Please let me know what you thought of this video,
and I'd love to hear from you in the comment section.
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if you'd like to see more.
For now, we'll see you in the next one.