"Get off the road..." [Driver passes by]
Hi, I'm Mike of Mike's Road Trip. If you're not familiar, I am a professional
travel blogger and a video content creator. As you can imagine, as a
video producer, I have quite a few pieces of gear in my kit, but the one tool in my
arsenal that I can't live without is a gimbal. I've been using gimble's for
maybe four years now, but I would say over the past year or so they have
really improved. Take for example the Feiyu Tech AK4500, which is remarkably
different than my go-to gimbal of choice in the past, the Rage by EVO. Now there is
a lot to like about this AK4500 by Feiyu Tech, but
there's also a few things to consider before purchasing, so come along with me
as I unbox and show you around the AK4500, the all-new gimbal by Feiyu Tech. The AK4500
has a nice carrying case, the only problem is you can't get it back in the box with your
balanced settings. You will find this smaller box inside the larger one, which
comes with the rack focusing gear as well as a secondary handle which doubles
as a remote control. You may feel a bit intimidated when you unbox as there are
a lot of pieces and parts, which boils down to the fact that this is a very capable gimbal as you will soon see. The downside is there's a much higher
learning curve. The AK4500 has everything you need, including this extension pole and a
collapsible tripod foot. One of the things I really love about this gimbal
is the additional handle which really helps increase the steadiness of you're
filming movements. The extra handle also doubles as a remote control with just
the wave of your hand. One of the first things you'll need to do with the unit is balance it
before turning it on. Feiyu Tech has improved this traditionally tedious
tasks by allowing the user to lock each gyroscope in place while you balance
just that single pivot point, then you can move to the next one until the
gimbal is perfectly balanced. You'll know when the gimbal is balanced when you can
place the camera in any position and it'll hold that position. This is what it
looks like when the AK4500 gimbal is not balanced.
This is the control center of the gimbal, which allows you to change the gimbal headings as well as the
camera settings. Attaching the additional handle is quite easy, just slide this
bracket into place then insert the set screws. Now here's a tip, I found the
tolerance a bit tight when one of the screws is all the way in it's really
tough to get the second one started, so just barely thread the first one in,
then jiggle the bracket a little until you can get the second screw started.
Depending on your application you could certainly use the extension pole in this
position instead of the smaller remote handle as I mentioned this gimbal is
outfitted with all the gear you need to perform rack focusing. I'm not going to
go into detail as that could be an entire video unto itself, but for those
of you who are doing higher-end shoots, this is a great addition.
There are also a number of cables included as well, allowing you to connect your camera so
that you can control your settings from the handle of the gimbal which you can
do by either the touch screen or the toggle button. If you encounter the
gimbal drifting like this or not staying level try calibrating it from the
settings menu and this should solve the issue. As you can see by this sample
footage it's quite remarkable how smooth the filming is using this gimbal. By
the way, this is all shot at 24 frames a second, you could even get smoother
footage by shooting in slow motion.
This is a pretty sophisticated gimbal with lots of features, which is great, but
if you want something a bit simpler to use, this might not be the gimbal for you.
That said, this is quite affordable gimbal given its camera capacity and robust features.
Well that's a look at the Feiyu Tech AK4500 gimbal. I hope you found this video
helpful, if so please hit the like button and don't forget to subscribe to
see my travel videos. If you have any questions at all, please leave a comment
below. Until next time, we'll see on the road...
MikesRoadTrip.com