- So inside this little box is the Zhiyun Crane-M2,
which is an appealing little gimbal for two reasons.
One is price.
It comes in at 269 currently in US dollars,
which is pretty good for a brand-new gimbal.
And also the size and compactness of this thing.
I mean, to put things in perspective,
this is the Ronin-S, and just this case alone you can see
it's completely different.
I mean, this is gonna fill up your whole suitcase.
This you can throw into your backpack.
And obviously the Ronin-S,
gonna be much more of a powerful gimbal, but look at it.
It's like the size of the handle.
And the weight of this with the a6400 plus kit lens
is still lighter than this without anything.
So let's take a look at this little guy,
see what's cool about it, why it sucks,
and should you get one?
Now, it is primarily marketed to be a good gimbal
for a point-and-shoot, like the Sony RX100, or a Canon G7X,
but obviously, you could still use your phone with it.
And the max payload is 1.58 pounds,
so that's just right around the Sony a6400
with a sort of slightly bigger lens than the kit lens,
but definitely not huge.
This is a Sigma 30mm F1.4.
And with the motors on high, it definitely works,
and it is smooth, but you could definitely tell
that it is on that higher end of that weight limit.
Because as long as everything's perfectly
balanced and everything,
your shots will come out smooth and looking pretty cool,
but if you do change your balance at all,
like maybe even opening up this screen
or something like that,
then you are gonna start to see a little bit
of that bobble, which is something that you see
where the motors just aren't strong enough.
But again, that's just because
we're at the top of the payload here.
But if you're shooting on a point-and-shoot
or a phone, you shouldn't have any issues.
(soft upbeat music)
Why do you... (laughs)
Matti's actually a robot. - Oh, sorry what?
- What gimbal do you use?
- I use the DJI Ronin-S.
I mean, my camera setups are pretty big.
I mean, I usually take off the microphone
if I'm on a gimbal, but this lens is big so.
- What I love about this is just look at this,
look at the difference.
This gimbal, no. (laughs)
- I feel like I'm not even holding anything in my left hand
and then I have a massive weight in my right arm right now.
This this seems like a terrible idea.
This is how you break your stuff. (laughs)
I almost feel like you could use that as just like a tripod.
If you were on this kind of setup for a point-and-shoot,
you really wouldn't even need a tripod.
I would just carry around this little gimbal.
- Oh right, and what's cool about this
is that you can switch it into lock mode
and literally you set it down anywhere
and you kind of just treat it like, you point the camera--
- Oh, interesting. - And it stays there.
So that's pretty cool.
- I can do that, too.
- Carrying this gimbal this size
it really stops becoming an inconvenience,
so that is the nice part about it,
but then it does lack that power
that you get from the bigger Ronin-S.
- You think we can put this on there?
- No, not even close.
So this is the a6400 with the kit lens,
which is a pretty small little setup here.
So this one actually balances fine.
I did try a bigger lens on it,
and we shot at the cottage with it
and around town yesterday.
- [Matti] That was probably pushing it a little bit.
- Yeah, it does work, but it does feel a little bit bouncy.
You have to to have it perfectly balanced.
So it probably makes sense to get a bigger gimbal
if you're gonna run bigger lenses,
but for point-and-shoot, it's convenient.
That's what it is.
It may not be the best gimbal,
but it's definitely convenient.
- Sometimes convenience is king.
- Yeah, especially when we're--
- Not story.
Story is not king. - Yeah, no.
- Just convenience. - Who cares about that?
If it's convenient for you to shoot,
it's gonna be a good video, probably.
- We all know that. - Maybe.
- No, nevermind. - No, no.
- And one thing I found interesting
is that when you're done shooting with it,
you just loosen up this guy,
and then you can actually drop this in just like that,
and this whole top portion gets locked into place.
And then you just have this one switch here
that you switch over and you can transport it.
And this is one of the features
that's kind of becoming a must-have for me.
Now, I can just take this,
stick this in the side of the bag, and I'm good.
And then when it comes time to shoot again,
all you have to do is unlock that,
and then you can slide this back out.
And every time you do slide this around
it will screw up your balance,
but luckily there's a lock on here
that you can adjust every time you get your gimbal balanced.
So you just slide it back up to there,
and your camera should be perfectly balanced again.
And to take your camera on and off,
it is just a thumb screw.
Ah!
And of course, the most important part of a gimbal,
is it smooth?
And I would say yeah it is,
and the way it feels out of the box
actually feels really good,
which is awesome because some of the older Zhiyun gimbals,
I felt like I had to go and customize it a little bit
in the app to get it to where I feel like it's super smooth.
But this out of the box it feels pretty nice and fluid,
so you don't have to go in and tweak a bunch of settings.
Then you got your display here
and a menu that's pretty straightforward
and simple to navigate, so I like that.
And one of the things I've complained
about their past gimbals is that
it isn't always easy to get into follow mode,
which is probably the most common mode
where if you point down, it goes down,
if you point left, it just points in the direction
that you're pointing.
It used to be kind of tricky to get into this mode,
but now, no matter what your setting is on the gimbal,
you just hit that trigger,
and it'll pop you in to follow mode.
So I love that they made it super accessible now.
And this mode here is pan follow,
which took me a second to get comfortable with,
but now that I am, I actually like it a lot
'cause you get your left and right
that it tracks very smoothly.
But it ignores your tilt axis.
So it's not gonna go up and down,
and if you do want to go up and down,
you can use this joystick here,
or you could just grab the camera and move it.
Those are probably the two modes I use most often,
but you do have POV mode and other modes,
like vortex where you can get some of those specialty shots
if you're into that kind of thing.
And getting into low mode is pretty nice and simple.
Now, one complaint I do have is that, mine at least,
this little joystick button, it's removable.
I don't know if it's removable,
or if mine just fell out.
But I keep losing this thing.
So I don't know.
If it's supposed to be removable,
maybe they could have sent us a few extras
'cause these things just keep falling out.
Or maybe they just forgot to glue this one in.
I don't know.
But if you know that you're gonna be using a small camera,
like a point-and-shoot, or something like this a6400,
or maybe a Canon M50 with one of their smaller lenses,
this is probably the best gimbal for the job.
I don't think there's much competing with this
for these sized cameras.
I mean, if you do plan on putting
on bigger lenses and stuff,
maybe look at the Ronin-SC or something in that world.
But again, once you step up to there,
you are going to lose the compactness
and the lightweightness of this thing.
And I really did enjoy just carrying this thing around
'cause it doesn't feel cumbersome.
It doesn't feel like you're carrying around
and dragging along this gimbal.
And of course, it does double as a phone gimbal,
so that's useful.
And you have functionality with the zoom
and record buttons up here with the app.
Battery life is seven hours,
and I think yeah, I'm actually getting around that range,
if not even a little bit more.
I put a lot of use to this,
and I haven't really had to charge it very much.
So overall, awesome gimbal for these sized cameras.
I'd recommend it, aside from this little button
just like falling off.
Let's close this off by reading a few comments
from my last video, which was all about
how to edit your audio to sound a little bit more pleasing
and better with using simple tools like Adobe Premiere.
Top comment was from Tomas.
Potato says hey Alex, thanks for coming to do this video.
My pleasure.
We're gonna record my fart.
Wait, what?
Potato locks the door.
(laughs)
That's exactly how it went down.
You get a heart.
Didn't expect to see Serj Tankian here.
I love System of a Down albums.
Yeah, that's that's actually very accurate.
He does look like him.
(laughs)
This is one of the best tutorials on audio editing,
something that I've been searching for a lot.
Thanks guys, really cool.
Yeah, that's one of the things is audio is crazy important,
a lot of times more important than the video itself,
so it's definitely worth knowing
about how to edit it a little bit, make it better.
And Alex is an expert,
so you should probably go check out that video,
if you haven't already.
Imo-san and beard-san again.
(laughs)
Imo is potato in Japanese.
Maybe I should just start a second channel all in Japanese.
(speaking foreign language)
(soft upbeat music)