- Check this out. This is the Zhiun Crane 2.
What's awesome about this
is that it can easily hold my Canon 80D.
It's got this little focus wheel thingy on it.
You can control the camera from here.
Blah ble-blah. All that cool stuff.
Let's just go shoot with it.
(upbeat pop music)
Alright, so first impressions,
it's nice and smooth.
At first, the default settings,
I felt like was a little bit too jerky.
Which is good if you're shooting sports and stuff like that,
but I'd rather have it nice and smooth.
So I went into the app and lowered a lot
of the sensitivity options
so that everything ends up being much more smooth and fluid.
Opposed to kinda quick, jerky little turns.
You might also notice I have this handle on here.
And I actually like this handle
a lot more than I thought I would.
It actually gives you a whole lot more control
when you're doing stuff like this,
and it also makes it so you can hold it a lot longer.
I've been carrying this thing around all day with me,
walking on the sand, getting sand in my shoes,
and getting burnt by the sun; all that stuff.
And thanks to this handle,
I haven't gotten super tired holding this thing.
I don't wanna throw this thing away in the dumpster yet.
It also comes with an accessory mount and a lot of people
are gonna be putting monitors on here.
So you can hook that up, but I got a GoPro just on here,
so I can take this camera and film this gimbal.
It might be a cool shot, we'll see.
(upbeat pop music)
You are filming this camera, film this camera,
filming you, filming this camera.
What?
Alright, so I have this thing perfectly balanced,
and all the knobs and everything tighten.
So, it's definitely giving me a lot of super smooth shots.
But a couple times, throughout the day,
it did start vibrating on me a little bit.
Can you see how much that's vibrating?
- [Male Voice] Yeah.
- Right now the motor strength is high
and it's still doing that.
I also tried it out at medium and low, uh,
still has the same issue.
It's doing it again.
My first impressions were that it was out of balance,
but it's not.
Or maybe one of these axis were loose,
but everything's tightened down.
It just sometimes does this little vibration dance.
And I actually really love this menu interface here.
I didn't realize how much
I was gonna love it until I started using it.
But you can control your f-stop right there,
your shutter speed, your ISO
all from here so that is awesome.
And of course you can hit that record button from here.
Nice not having to come up here and turn all these dials
and all this stuff while all this gimbal's engaged.
So, throughout that sequence I was running the 10-18mm.
It's a really nice, super wide-angle lens,
but, uh, is it vibrating again?
Oh my God, check that out.
It's vibrating like cr-.
When it's not vibrating
insanely out of control, it's smooth.
But, yeah, it's running the 10-18mm len-
oh my God, it's doing it again.
What the heck are you do-what it is that?
Since this lens is so wide, and it has image stabilization,
it's not super hard to make this footage
out of this lens look smooth.
To get a real sense of how smooth a gimbal is,
you need to put on a tighter lens
with no image stabilization.
This one is one of my favorites.
It's the Sigma 18-35 f1.8.
This is gonna be cool 'cause it's gonna give us
some nice cinematic, shallow depth of field.
And also, it's gonna be great in low light.
So, let's see if we can balance
this thing on here real quick.
This is not a light-weight lens, either.
A lot of gimbals actually have issues with this lens.
So, I dropped the camera all the way down,
but you can see it's still a little bit top-heavy.
We're gonna have to lower the center of gravity
a little bit over this way.
So, I'm gonna have to take off this battery grip.
Poof.
Ah, there we go, much better.
And I feel like a lot of these hand-held gimbals,
they actually work better when they're on flatter cameras.
Cameras with a battery grip like this,
or taller cameras like the 1DX,
they seem to have a lot of issues when balancing on these.
Zhiun also makes a monitor,
so I'm gonna throw that on the handle.
And what's cool is that Zhiun has this external power cable.
So you can actually power this monitor from right here
if you want, but it is gonna kill this battery
in here faster if you're feeding a monitor.
Monitors love to use up a lot of power.
So, I'm gonna just throw it's own battery right on here.
Luckily, these use a very common,
Sony NP-style battery like this one.
We got a new lens on here.
We're gonna hook up this monitor.
We look all legit, let's go get some footage.
(country music)
(electronic music)
Now these run off 18650 batteries,
and there's pros and cons to it.
The con is you can't really just charge it
by plugging it in, you literally have to take this all off.
You have to take these three batteries out,
throw them on the charger and it's a little bit of a hassle.
But what I love about 18650 batteries,
are that they can pack a punch.
They can output a lot of power.
They're getting more and more common.
You can sometimes even pick 'em up at Walmart,
and they are not expensive.
You can use these to power other devices,
like I have a Tilta Nucleus follow focus system
that uses these same batteries.
So, less types of batteries that I have to own, the better.
And they might be more common than you think.
Like, for example, this RED battery
has a lot of capacity in here but let's open one up.
What's that inside?
A bunch of 18650 batteries hooked up together.
The Tesla Model S is literally a bunch
of 18650 batteries tethered together.
So, 18650 batteries, I like them.
And that's probably my biggest gripe
about the DJI Ronin series.
I've been Ronin-operating for years now.
I've had four of these batteries.
Each one, a 150 bucks each.
Two of them completely stopped working
and two of them are already showing signs of issues.
This one just, like, inflated so much that it, like cracked.
Alright, here's a question,
what is the biggest camera
I can throw on this thing and balance it?
One, I'm curious, what kind
of weight and size this thing can handle.
And two, I need a good click-baity thumbnail
so let's do this.
C100 Mark II, will it balance?
It's almost there, the issue here
is that it's still very top-heavy.
So, one way we can actually counter that,
is sticking weights on the bottom.
So, check this out, I just screwed this thing on here,
and all it's doing is taking the weight
and adding some over here and down low.
The super unofficial way of balancing
your C100 Mark II on the Zhiun Crane 2.
It honestly doesn't feel terrible actually.
I can actually see myself using this setup.
It'll just look a little bit silly
to have this little nub hanging off there,
but, hey, it serves a purpose.
Next contestant, Canon 80D with a cine lens.
It literally won't even mount on this plate,
'cause this lens is too big.
I need to put the plate like right around here
and it just won't mount
without this lens getting in the way.
I have to add that vertical grip.
Wow, this 80D looks like a beast.
Look at this thing.
Okay, this is gonna be a challenge for sure.
The auto-focus on these Canon cameras,
and most DSLRs now are getting so good that
you can pretty much rely on them
and they're gonna be better than just running manual focus.
Unless you have a trained AC.
But whether you use cinema lenses or any manual lens,
you're gonna need some sort of device
to pull that focus for ya.
I think these come standard with the Crane 2s now.
Here's another thing I wanna complain about,
this threads right onto here and it threads on clockwise.
Which means when you have it on tight,
when you turn it this way, it gets tighter,
and you turn it this way, it gets looser.
Because of the shape of this thing,
you can tell Zhiun clearly designed
this to go on this side of the lens just like that.
It would clamp on to this rod, right here,
and clamp on to the lens just like that.
It naturally wants to press away this way
because of all the pressure
it's putting up against this lens.
It wants naturally to turn that way.
Problem with that is when it turns this rod
a little bit, it loosens it.
So, I guarantee what's gonna happen
is after a certain amount of time of pulling focus
like this, it's eventually gonna press away
then loosen this down here and just flop off.
Which is super annoying.
So if you have to put it on this rod,
the better way would be to undersling it like that.
But you can tell, just by where the teeth are,
that it wasn't really designed to do that.
Zhiun, please for version two,
either reverse thread this rod
or another way of attaching this rod altogether.
Trust me, if you have an all day shoot
with something like this, you have it set up,
and then it plops off on you three times every hour,
you are gonna get so pissed.
Tighten that sucker down.
I think we're gonna have to add more weight to the bottom.
And in case you guys aren't understanding
why I need to add weight to the bottom,
it's because if I kick the camera on it's side,
just like that, and I let it go,
it wants to turn to the side like that.
Yeah, see how it's so top-heavy?
So, to balance that out,
I just need to add more weight to the bottom.
So now, with this weight on, it falls that way.
Which is great, now it's bottom heavy.
So then I can just slide this back up a little bit.
(mmm)
We gotta pretty good balance going.
It generally stays wherever I put it.
So I got everything hooked up, ready to go.
Ho, ho, ho, ho, oh my gosh, look at this thing.
Holy crap, this is amazing.
Not gonna lie, this is pretty cool.
I never thought I'd be able to operate
a cinema lens like this.
What?
I'm using this focus wheel right here
and I'm monitoring off this screen here.
And of course I can control
all of the camera settings from here.
But, whoa...dude.
This isn't even the prettiest shot ever,
but, dude, it's so crisp.
(upbeat music)
What do you guys think of my rig?
- That's pretty dope, can I touch it?
- Yeah.
- Hi!
(upbeat music)
- Thanks for helping me with my click-bait.
We'll either get a lot of clicks
from your face or from this camera.
What do you think?
- I think the face.
- Yeah, the face definitely sells this video.
We're gonna get so many clicks off this thumbnail, dude.
Here's another one of their accessories that they sent me.
You can wirelessly pull focus, which is awesome,
if you have yourself an assisted camera.
There's a tiny bit of latency.
It's not as fast as some of
the professional ones that are really expensive.
But it's not terrible, check it out.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
It also has this thing called gravity mode.
You press the button and you turn the remote to the right,
the camera turns to the right.
Turn it to the left, turns to the left.
But to be honest, the responsiveness of this
is not good enough to the point where
I would ever actually use it.
It's cool, I'd like to show people this trick,
but it's just too, the control of it
is just not accurate enough.
I would much rather just use this joystick.
Anyways, what'd you guys think of the footage?
All of this gimbal footage, by the way,
has been shot on the Canon 80D.
And I color-graded them using my LUTS, link in description.
But anyway, Zhiun did tell me
that they are working on some new gimbals.
They didn't tell me much about it
but there's gonna be gimbals coming out
in the Crane series that is supposed to be
a new and improved version of the 2.
So, I guess we'll all keep a close ear for that.
But, anyways, I need to get to sleep.
It is way past midnight.
I have a shoot tomorrow.
I am flying over to Spokane, Washington.
Never been there before, so yeah,
I should probably start packing my gear instead
of filming this YouTube video.
I'm gonna end this video by
throwing this 18-35mm back on here.
We're gonna take this over
to a midnight adventure to the corner store.
And of course, edit it
to my favorite genre of elevator music.
(jazz music)