- Hello, and welcome to another video
on this awesome YouTube channel, Potato Jet.
Today we have two really awesome gimbals here with us.
Over here we have the bigger, better, more powerful RS2
and we also have the RSC2,
C standing for compact.
So, just like before we had the Ronin S,
which was the bigger and bulkier but more powerful
handheld gimbal.
And then we had the Ronin SC,
which was their compact version.
Now, I liked the Ronin gimbals,
but they weren't my favorite for a couple of reasons,
why we'll go into,
but there are some really big upgrades in here
which we're gonna go into, so these are very exciting.
But before we get into all the technical (mumbles)
let's just see some footage.
So, let's cut to yesterday.
(car engine revving)
(upbeat music)
We got Sam on the R2 doing all the dirty work
and Carrie and I are just having a blast.
Are you getting all nice and dusty?
- Just showered.
This is my weekly shower was yesterday,
now I have to answer next week.
- [Gene] (laughs) Your weekly shower?
Carrie's not gonna allow you back in the house anymore.
- I'm saving the environment, Gene.
- [Gene] First couple shots on the RS2, what do you think?
- [Sam] It's pretty smooth and I like how it feels
just the grip feels really secure in my hand.
(car engine revving)
(Gene laughing)
- I'm gonna miss this thing,
I'm really gonna miss this truck.
- I get super comfortable with this.
If I could describe one word for this thing, is comfortable.
- [Gene] It feels good?
- It's pleasant, very pleasant.
- Now of course the goal of any gimbal
is to get as smooth as possible.
Now, both these gimbals have the new tightened algorithm,
which will give us more improved stabilization.
So I got the Canon R6 on here,
and I'm just gonna try to see what kind of shots
we can get right here.
And it's looking really smooth
and I think one of the things I really love about this
is how good it feels.
It feels super super predictable.
I hate when you buy a brand new gimbal,
you kind of have to tune it to make it feel smooth,
but out of the box, it feels really really good.
By the way, it has been insanely windy and dusty today.
So, these gimbals have been coated in dust.
Look at all this dust.
- [Sam] Oh my gosh, oh, that's disgusting.
- I can't even see the footage from today
because it's so fricking dusty.
You should definitely try to keep dust away from gimbals
as much as possible, but sometimes you go out to a location,
you wanna get that cool shot and it's gonna get dusty,
it's gonna get rained on, it's gonna get snowed on.
And we're back.
Now, keep in mind that they're both prototypes,
early beta versions of the firmware.
So instead of this being a full on review,
it's gonna be more of a first look at some of the features
that these have.
Let's start off by talking about what I consider to be
the biggest upgrade, which is the smaller size.
Now, both of these gimbals fit into these little bags
right here, which is great for portability
when you compare it to this case right here.
And if you ever tried traveling with this thing,
then it takes up a majority of your suitcase.
So, that was a big drawback of the original Ronin S.
So when you compare the two,
you could see that the RS2 is definitely shorter.
We have carbon fiber arms now, trimmed down the weight,
I believe it's 25% less weight.
The full arm, professional Ronin 2
has these carbon fiber arms.
And I love that they pulled that from that design,
because not only is it lighter,
but when you're sliding around for balancing,
it feels so much better to slide around carbon fiber
than metal against metal.
You're trying to make that tiny, tiny adjustment,
and you press too hard, it goes, uuh,
scoots all the way over,
and it just takes a long time,
I hate that process.
The carbon fiber arm actually makes it
a little bit more slick
and just easier to get those precise movements.
And speaking of balancing,
let's take a closer look at this knob right here.
And when you're balancing the camera forward and back,
you actually have this knob to do some of these
small micro adjustments.
Less carbon fiber and this knob
is a feature of the larger RS2.
Now, let's take a look at the more compact RSC2,
and what's really cool about this, is this knob right here.
I loosened that up to unlock and look at this, it folds.
Now, at first I was like, okay,
that's kind of weird that it folds,
but I guess it's kind of cool, whatever.
It's actually one of my favorite features
and we'll get into why in a bit.
So a lot of what gets me really excited about this,
is in the detail.
So let's start off with just this base plate.
Now, this part right here is a Manfrotto plate,
so that's great, that's very common.
But also this right here, is a Arca-Swiss mount.
So right now we're using the Sachtler FSB 8,
which uses the Manfrotto plate
and also the peak design tripod, which uses an Arca-Swiss.
So at any point, I could just pull it off of this gimbal
and throw it right on the tripod.
But when we put these together,
we get a little bit of elevation right there,
which is great because a lot of these new mirrorless cameras
are gonna be smaller than the larger lenses.
So, we need that clearance especially if you wanna pull zoom
or focus, it's not grinding up against the base plate.
So that's great.
So let's throw that back on.
And we also have a lock on all three axes,
which is great for either balancing or transportation.
How many locks does the original Ronin S have? Zero.
Now the RSC 2 does have a little display back here,
super useful to know what kind of mode you're on.
You can set your basic adjustments without having
a hookup to an app or anything like that.
And the larger RS2, has a larger touch screen display.
Now both of these do have a trigger and a scroll wheel,
and Oh my God,
we have construction, a truck and an airplane
all happening at once.
I apologize for the terrible audio.
I'm so sorry.
So both of these feel pretty good in the hands.
We got a trigger, we got a wheel,
which we can set for the focus.
We flip it around to the other side here.
We got a joystick as well as a record button
and a M which I think stands for mode, right?
Mode, M, mode, manual, I don't know, micro?
We also have NATO rails on the side,
we can attach all kinds of things to it, attachments.
I have this one here,
set up to be a monitor holder for the C300,
but we also can attach our phones here, handles.
This is kind of a cool little accessory,
which can go ahead and slide onto this NATO rail right here.
And we can take that tripod, thread it in right there
and go into briefcase mode.
Oh yeah, we fancy.
Sam, you were using the gimbal all day yesterday,
how was it?
- I like it.
(wind whistling)
Now, they both do come with a super stable option
where I'm gonna assume that it just really
stiffens up the motors, gets a little bit more aggressive.
They do say you need to put this strap on here on the lens.
It's going to really anchor this lens right here,
so that you now have two really solid points of contact.
That's gonna make it so that this gimbal
can really get a good grasp of the camera
and point it in the direction it needs to.
This is something that we're gonna need to test
in a later video,
but they're saying that 100mm lens should look pretty good
on this gimbal with super stabilization mode on.
Wow!
Did my head explode?
If it didn't, let's try again.
Wow!
(explosion booms)
- So what's the camera capacity that these can fit?
Well, the RS has been tested at 10 pounds,
but really with these gimbals being so powerful,
it's more about what can actually physically fit
within the dimensions without getting all crazy.
Now on here, we have the RS2, with the C300 Mark III,
and this is a very similar size to the C500.
Now we did have to make some adjustments.
We did put on the smaller BP-A30 battery
and a pretty compact lens,
but check that out on the RS2, it's fitting just fine,
we have clearance to go in that mode and I have the monitor
kind of hooked up to the side.
We actually did a few test shots with it yesterday,
out in the desert,
I was chasing Sam around full on sprint.
So how did that look, me running full sprint
underslung mode?
(Sam laughs)
That's actually not bad.
Now, is this gimbal designed for cameras of this size?
Not really.
I mean, it can kind of work,
but I'm gonna assume that once you start slapping on
bigger lenses, bigger batteries,
you're gonna start running into some trouble.
But I wanna say, like an ideal camera to have on here
is probably like a Canon 1DX with a pretty large lens.
I think a perfect camera to put on here
is gonna be that Canon C70, that is gonna be coming out.
I think that's gonna be the perfect camera on here,
it's gonna fit nicely,
you're gonna fit up the lenses you want on there.
I'm gonna guess that the RED Komodo
is gonna be a really ideal setup to have
on this gimbal here.
And then we have this more compact RSC2,
and I was very excited to see that it can actually
easily clear this Canon R6 with is 15-35 RF lens.
Not a small setup, but it clears it just fine.
I think that was the biggest issue I had
with the original Ronin SC,
was that it was perfect for a Sony mirrorless camera.
But when I put my Canon EOS R with this lens on here,
it didn't give it enough clearance.
So this just gave it just that little extra bit of space
so that it can fit this setup.
So now that I'm starting to shoot most of my stuff
on this Sony a7S III, this is zero issues for the RSC2.
I do still wanna do in depth videos on both these gimbals.
So, if there's any sort of camera setups
that you guys wanna see, let me know in the comments below,
and I'll try to test as many as possible.
And we have a plane ruining my audio again.
This is my life guys.
This is my life.
Just every second of my life
is just my audio being ruined by planes.
Now, remember how earlier I was saying,
"I think it's really cool how this thing folds."
Well, what's cool, is that you can actually use it
in different positions and you can actually lock it in.
If you're going underslung mode, you just bend it,
just like that, lock that in, and check this out,
pretty sweet, right?
And there's a couple different ways or methods,
you can set this thing up
so that it's comfortable in your hands as you use it,
but that is awesome.
Snap it back together, go right side back up,
and you're back on a normal gimbal.
Love that feature, that's so cool.
You could also get it in a pro package,
which gives you a few more cool bells and whistles.
My favorite out of these bells and whistles,
is the raven eye,
that's this little box down here.
It's connected to the camera via HDMI right there.
And that is now gonna send a signal to my phone, right?
So, I'm gonna go ahead clamp that right here on the side.
And this app is pretty solid,
I can go ahead and add in a lot.
Now this is C-Log,
so let me go ahead and add that C-Log on there.
Now I can go here, enable joystick.
So I can now go ahead and actually control the camera,
there's Sam right there.
But my favorite is this force mobile,
so I go ahead and activate that, and check it out.
I'm now controlling the camera with my phone.
Now the Ronin SC, did have a similar feature like this,
but it didn't give you the video signal.
So now with this raven eye,
you're able to actually get a whole system like this going.
Pretty awesome, right?
Now I have this on the RS2,
so even when you don't have the phone plugged in,
you have a little display
to see what's going on with the camera.
What is really cool about it,
is that you can actually activate active track from here.
So even if you don't have a phone connected
or anything like that, you can go ahead, tap that trigger.
So now you're able to access active track
within the gimbal itself without the use of a phone
or anything like that.
But yeah, that's pretty much all I got for the first look
at these gimbals.
If you guys have any requests on things you want me to test
with these gimbals, I will happily do a deep dive,
just let me know in the comments.
Anyways, video too long, way too long now.
All right, bye.
(upbeat music)