- Hey guys, how's it going?
Welcome to another very unscientific review,
this time of the Zhiyun Crane 2.
(upbeat music)
And now before we get into it,
if you didn't get a chance to see the last video I posted,
the channel name has been changed to Matti Haapoja.
It's no longer Travel Feels,
and I explained a little bit about why it is.
The content is all staying the same, nothing is changing.
If anything, I'm just gonna be adding more content.
And also, the merch,
merch is staying, that's not going anywhere.
I'm still gonna be selling it.
It's gonna be under travelfeels.com for now, the store.
But that might change, but the merch,
everything else, all that is staying still.
Alright, so I was hanging out with my good friend Peter
and I had just received the Crane 2.
It got sent to me, and I thought I would give it a review
and see what it's like.
And for those of you who saw the Glidecam,
Steadicam video,
right now I'm still using this guy,
the Glidecam 2000 XR.
This is like their older model.
I still use this thing all the time.
All the travel videos, all that stuff.
It's been filmed using the Glidecam 2000.
I still haven't really gotten into gimbals a lot.
I've tried a whole bunch of different gimbals,
and I always default back to the Glidecam 2000.
But Steadicams do have their limitations.
So I'm still looking for that gimbal
that will replace the Glidecam 2000.
And the question is,
will the Crane 2 finally be the replacement for me?
And I was pretty excited unboxing this and checking it out
because I heard that it can actually handle a 1D X Mark II,
which is no small camera.
This thing is pretty beefy.
So I was super interested
because I love using this thing right now
for anything that I need really cinematic, epic (mumbles).
The 120 frames on this camera is just so good.
That's one of the big reasons
why I use the Glidecam 2000 still
because it's just really easy to put on there.
But I heard that the Crane 2 can handle a 1D X Mark II.
So I was super excited to try it out.
Now the Crane 2 is a really nicely built gimbal.
I really like the fact that this cradle area
is really big, probably the biggest that I've seen for these
handheld little gimbals.
It's a really big space.
And that's been one of the big problems with these gimbals,
is that you can't balance the camera
because it starts hitting one of the arms
or something's hitting somewhere
and it just doesn't fit properly
in order to balance it well.
So that was one of the big things
that I really liked right away,
is this big area that you can use
all sorts of different cameras and lens setups
with this gimbal, which makes the balancing process
just so much easier,
which is one of my biggest gripes with gimbals,
is that they're just kind of annoying to balance.
You have to be really precise.
They go off balance really easily
if you change a lens or change anything.
You have to do a lot of rebalancing,
and it just takes a lot of time,
which I don't often have, especially for YouTube videos.
So that right away was a big bonus.
And I love that they nowadays ship a lot of these gimbals
with these stands.
This makes a huge difference.
You can just stick it on a table
or whatever and balance it.
That really helps with the balancing process,
and also it acts as kind of a longer handle,
which I find really useful.
You can have two hands on it like this.
I like that a lot.
It also comes with this nice little case,
really easy to transport.
But there's one thing that I don't like about these cases.
You know, picture like ten 50-year-old chain smoker dudes
just breathing into a case
and you opening it up and taking a big whiff.
That's kind of what this smells like.
I don't know why.
Cool case, but smells bad.
But the question is, can it handle the 1D X Mark II,
and the answer is yes but...
So you do have to do some manipulating of the gimbal.
You actually have to remove some screws right here.
There's four little screws.
You have to take them off.
Because this arm isn't actually long enough,
you need it to go further down
because the 1D X is such a tall camera.
That's a bit of a manufacturing flaw I found.
They should have just made this arm longer.
You have all this space and the weight capacity.
Just make it a little bit bigger
and it would have been perfect for the 1 DX II.
But if you take off those screws
you can move it down a little bit further
and then you can balance it properly.
But what I did find is that
as soon as I had the 1D X Mark II on here,
what would start happening is that
it would do this nodding thing.
It was perfectly balanced,
but it would just be nodding the whole time.
And I actually had this even with a smaller 6D Mark II,
which is still a pretty beefy setup,
with the 16 to 35,
but with the 6D it would stop doing it.
But with the 1D X it just kept doing it.
It wouldn't stop doing this little nodding thing.
So right away I just took it off.
I just didn't even bother testing it out with the 1D X.
Because for me, I need to be able to trust a tool always.
I can't be fighting with it,
trying to make it work like it's supposed to.
I need it to work every time perfectly.
So right away my trust was kind of broken.
I cannot use this with the 1DX II.
And I've seen other people use it.
You can definitely balance it on there
and maybe if I played around with the tuning settings
or something like that I could have gotten rid of that
little nodding action that was going on.
But for me, I don't want to be battling with a tool.
A tool is supposed to help me to get the best shots,
and right away that was kind of a red flag for me.
So I stuck with the 6D Mark II for this test,
and this worked really well.
It is a pretty big setup like you can see.
But the Crane 2 handled it perfectly.
As I was reviewing the footage,
I'm always amazed at how good the results are
with just a few minutes of using it.
I had never used this gimbal before,
and just like that I'm able to get
really clean, smooth shots
that would be really hard to get on a Glidecam.
It would take a lot of practice
for somebody to be able to get shots like these.
So that's definitely a massive bonus of using gimbals.
And I'd say the shots from the Crane 2
are really, really smooth.
I was actually really impressed with this.
And the gimbal worked great for the most part.
There were some times where it was
a little bit shaky and a little bit off,
but really good gimbal, strong motors.
You can tell right away that it can
handle a little bit more weight.
I was trying a whole bunch of different shots,
putting it to the test,
because that's really the only way you can find out
whether a gimbal is really good
for your kind of shooting or not.
An interesting thing that I haven't seen
on any of the other gimbals so far is this focus wheel.
So on some cameras you can actually use this wheel
to focus your camera,
which is a really cool idea I think.
I never like touching the lens while I'm on the gimbal.
I like having my hands down here,
and so this allows you to focus
without having to take off your hands.
Now I don't see this being so useful
in actually changing focus while you're shooting.
I can't see my self using this with one hand
and having one hand on the focus
and actually trying to do a move and focusing at the same...
I can't see it happening.
That seems super, super hard,
and just really, really tiring.
Now to mention, I think it won't be as stable.
You'll have a lot more movement
when you're using just one hand.
I think you really do need two hands
to make this nice and stable.
But just to set your focus really quickly
without having to touch the lens,
that's a really cool feature.
Now for me, I'm almost always just
shooting on auto focus when I'm on a gimbal or Glidecam.
With the Canons I can trust it.
So this feature isn't super handy for me,
but I could see it being useful for a lot of other people.
And now, there was nothing really wrong about this gimbal.
But to be honest, I'm kind of getting
tired of this form factor.
I don't think it works really well.
I don't like holding it from down here.
It's just not natural and intuitive.
Nothing has really changed
in these gimbals form factor wise.
They're just doing the same thing over and over again.
And I'd like to see some innovations
with just the way that you use it,
the form factor.
I don't like this whole stick and then camera thing on top.
It just doesn't work really well for me.
I'd rather see something like a circle tube around
where you have a lot of options
to hold it from different places.
You can go low down and high up.
You can try a whole bunch of different stuff.
Whereas, this is really limited in the way that you use it.
And the biggest thing for me is doing these rotating shots.
I don't think this is the best way to do these.
You really want two hands on two handles,
spinning the gimbal around.
That's the best way to get these rotating smooth shots.
This never works really that well,
holding onto this tube and spinning it around.
I just never liked it.
I feel like all the companies are just copying each other
and just doing the same things,
and there's been very little innovation
in the form factor of these gimbals
in the years that they've been out already.
So I'd like to see something better with that,
even though this is a gimbal that works really well
and this is not a specific critique of the Crane 2,
this is just with all these
different little handheld gimbals.
They all have the same issue.
And yes, with practice you can definitely
get good at using something like this.
But I think there's a better way of doing it,
which would just open it up to a lot of different users
who aren't so comfortable
with using something like a gimbal.
There's an easier way of doing this,
I think at least.
So the question is, is this a replacement for my Glidecam?
And I gotta say no, it isn't.
Great gimbal, but it's just not for me.
I still haven't found a gimbal
that I can stick on any camera,
even the 1D X Mark II, which is big,
and be really easy to use
and have it always work no matter what.
I still haven't found the gimbal
that can replace the Glidecam
as my daily driver or stabilizer for all my cameras.
And again, this is totally unscientific.
These are just my opinions on things.
And things could be totally different for you.
So I always recommend, test out the equipment
before you make any sort of decisions
on what you're gonna buy.
Because for you and your shooting style,
the Crane 2 could be the perfect tool,
but for me it's just not the perfect tool right now,
for the kinds of stuff that I'm shooting.
So do your research and test it out
before you buy anything.
All right, if you're curious about the gimbal
I'll link it down below.
I hope you guys enjoyed this little unscientific review
and some of my thoughts on gimbals.
I just wanna like them so bad,
but so far I haven't.
All right, that's it for today guys.
Thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)