Hi everyone, my name is Evan Thomas and in today's review video you're going to learn
everything you need to know about the new Zhiyun Weebill Lab.
We're going to unbox the Weebill Lab, setup, balance the gimbal and I'm going to show you
some tips and tricks for getting started, and how to get amazing footage.
Let me start off by saying that I am so happy with the Zhiyun Weebill Lab.
I mainly use gimbals for travel videos, and I was previously using the Zhiyun Crane 2,
but it was much too big, cumbersome, bulky and heavy to fit into my travel bag.
This is where the Zhiyun Weebill Lab comes in, it's light compact and powerful.
It's absolutely tiny!
The Weebill Lab is an amazing product, and it fits in my travel bag, my beach bag, my
backpack.
You can take it with you anywhere and it barely weighs anything.
If you're wondering why it has such a strange name, the weebill is actually a small Australian
bird, so the name is actually quite fitting considering how small this gimbal is.
It also has a new design that allows you to do underslung mode, and I'm going to show
you all of that, so let's get started and unbox the weebill lab.
The first thing you'll notice is this styrofoam box, and I'm not really a fan of it, this
is the route DJI goes for their Osmos.
It does have latches here to it does feel secure, but I much prefer the old Zhiyun travel
cases that were hard shelled and that provided much better protection for your gimbal.
I feel that this case is pretty cheap and over time it's going to get damaged.
So let's open it up.
Inside we have the battery charger, the batteries, the tripod, and I'm so glad they included
the tripod, it also doubles as a handle for underslung mode.
All of the cables and accessories you might need.
The baseplate, and finally, the gimbal itself.
Ok so check this out, look at how small and compact the zhiyun weebill lab is!
I'm going to give you a side by side of the weebill lab vs. the crane 2 and an apple for
reference.
This small size is thanks to the new design with the batteries.
The batteries in the Zhiyun crane 2 are down here in the handle, and in this new design,
the batteries go here.
So I'm just going to pop them in!
The batteries last 6 to 10 hours, the manual claims 12 hours but I feel that is a little
bit of a stretch and they take 2 to 3 hours to full charge.
I'm going to attach the tripod, and there you have it.
This tripod acts as a handle, but I'm going to use it to setup.
It's very important to get your gimbal perfectly balanced, if it's not balanced, the motors
will need to work harder, the footage will be shakier and your battery will die faster.
Not to mention you can damage the gimbal if it's not balanced correctly.
The first thing you need to do is attach your camera to the baseplate.
The bigger and heavier your camera is, the further back you need to attach it to the
baseplate.
This camera is fairly light so I'm going to keep it right in the middle.
You can use a coin or a screw driver to attach this.
And then you hold down this button and slide it in.
And what you want to do is get the center of gravity of the camera to be lined up with
the axis of this motor.
So if you can image, the center of gravity of this camera is somewhere where the sensor
is.
So obviously if you have a longer lens, the center of gravity is going to be further out
away from the camera.
But on this, balance it on one finger and it kind of gives you an idea of where the
center of gravity is.
The center of gravity for this camera is like, right around here, on my finger.
So I want to align up this point of the camera with this motor.
So I push down this button, slide it in, and then I'm going to tighten this screw here
on the side.
And then I'm going to unlock this screw here, and that's going to allow the camera to tilt
freely.
So the first one you want to adjust is this side one, and it adjusts the height, and as
you can see, I can slide it up, I can slide it down.
If I go all the way to the bottom, you will notice the camera will only stay flat.
If I hold it here and let go, it's going to stay flat, if I go all the way to the top,
you can see that the camera is always going to point down no matter what.
And that's not good either, so you want to sort of find a sweet spot in the middle where
you can point the camera in one direction and it will stay there.
So I'm going to go back up and, and you're always just making micro adjustments.
That's close, see how it's staying when I let go.
So that's about good on the height, now I just need to adjust this part, so you can
see that the camera is pointing up, which means there is too much weight go that way,
so I'm going to loosen this screw here and push the camera forward slightly.
Now the camera is going too far forward that way, so I need to push it back that way.
Basically what that is saying is that the center of gravity of the camera is too far
forward of that motor, so I need to push it forward that way.
Ok so once you have the weebill lab balanced, you should be able to point the camera in
any direction and it should be able to stay in that direction.
This can be so frustrating when you're first getting started, I've always thrown my Weebill
lab out the window a few times, but as soon as you get the feel for it, you'll be able
to balance it in no time.
If you want to check out another video I made that goes into more detail on balance the
weebill lab, click this link here.
Ok now that the tilt motor is balanced, I'm going to lock it here, and I'm going to balance
the roll motor.
And you can see when I let go the, camera goes in that direction which means we need
to push the camera that way.
On the old zhiyun crane, you would loosen the screw here, but on the weebill lab, the
screw is actually on the bottom of the baseplate.
So unscrew that, push the camera this way, we're always making micro adjustments, I pushed
it too far, tighten it, put it this direction, put it that direction, it's perfectly balanced.
So I'm going to tighten it up, I'm going to lock it one more time, and now we just have
this bottom motor to balance.
And to do that, you hold the weebill lab parallel to the table or to the ground.
This one is always a little bit harder, it gives you a good workout too.
And you can see that this gimbal is balanced so I'm going to tighten it up.
Now I should be able to point the camera in any direction and it should stay there, that's
a perfectly balanced gimbal, that's how you do the test, that's the balance test there,
point it in any direction and if it stays there, the weebill is balanced.
If you have multiple lenses and you're always swapping them out, you'll find that it's really
annoying to always rebalance the gimbal when swapping the lens, so what I like to do is
always note, with these little hashmarks where the gimbal is balanced for each lens and I
put that in the notes of my phone, that way you will always have a quick reference of
which lens requires which hashmark.
Now I'm going to walk you through all of the modes, the first one and the one I use most
often is the pan follow mode.
And to get into that mode simply slide this button up to PF, and pan follow means if you
pan left, you pan right, the gimbal follows.
If I slide that button down to L for lock, the gimbal is locked in any position, no matter
what I do the camera and gimbal are going to stay facing forward.
So I'm going to click that back up to PF to go into pan follow.
If you want to turn the camera around for vlogging, tripple tap the trigger button and
then you can do vlogging.
Tripple tap again to go back forward.
If I hold down the "go" button, that simply puts the weebill into go follow mode, which
means it acts more quickly to all of my movements.
If I hold down the trigger on the back of the gimbal, it goes into follow mode, which
means if I tilt down, tilt up, the camera will follow.
If you tap the POV button, that puts you in point of view, and what that means is that
the camera will follow your roll movements as well.
If I double tap POV, the camera points forward, and I can use the joystick to rotate it, this
is sort of a mode I wouldn't see myself using that often.
Probably the coolest thing about the gimbal besides it's size is this underslung mode.
So if I remove the tripod and put it on the weebill here, you also want to make sure the
lock button is clicked so that the tripod doesn't accidentally come unscrewed, now you
can hold the gimbal in underslung mode.
This is really effective for getting those shots really close the ground.
In the old gimbals you would have to invert the gimbal, hold the tripod awkwardly and
it always felt like the gimbal was going to fall out of your hard, but with this one,
you can have a much easier time getting this low shots to the ground.
Before I go any further, I'd just like to say, if you're enjoying this video, please
click the like button, click the subscribe button to see more tutorials and reviews,
and if you have any questions at all, please leave a question in the comments section,
I respond to every single question.
So there are definitely some design improvements from previous versions of the crane.
One being that this motor no longer obstructs the view of the LCD screen on the camera.
In the old crane 2 this motor was higher up and you couldn't see into the LCD screen,
the other added benefit of having the motor lower is that when you do go into the underslung
mode, you have a little bit more room for a shotgun mic on top without the motor hitting
it.
Another great design feature of the weebill that the other gimbals don't have is this
arca swiss and manfrotto release plate.
So if I unscrew this here and push down this button, I can take it off, change the batter,
change the memory card, I can go handheld for a while and if I want to quickly reattach
it to the gimbal without losing my balance.
I just push down this button and slide it back on and make sure it's locked, tighten
this to be double secure, and you can see that my balance has remained the same.
So this is a huge design improvement over previous version of the crane, where you would
have to buy a 3rd party quick release plate.
The pros of this weebill gimbal is that it is lightweight, compact, pretty affordable,
some of the cons are with the design of the buttons, so for example when I was showing
you the go mode, if you have this on a monopod or in underslung mode, you can't use go mode
because you have to be holding it down, this is an oversight by Zhiyun and I'm hoping they
will fix this with a software or firmware update soon, there is one way to solve this
problem and that is to use the Zhiyun app, which you can download by scanning this QR
code, and it's also beneficial for setting the sensitivity, the weight and all the nuances
that you want in your gimbal.
So the menu system is a little bit unintuitive at first, there isn't really a menu button,
what you have to do is click the button of the scroll wheel where the 3 dots are, and
to click accept you click the right and to go back you click the left of the scroll wheel.
It's still a little bit unintuitive but once you get used to it you'll be fine.
So all said and done, the weebill lab is an amazing gimbal for it's size.
If you have a bigger A7RIIIor A7SII and you're using big lenses, you might want to go with
the Zhiyun crane 2, but for a Sony A6500 or Sony A6300, the weebill is absolutely perfect
especially if you're taking it on vacation with you, or if you're making travel videos.
The size and the compactness I cannot praise enough, I mean just look at how small this
thing is and when it's all locked up with out the camera, it's absolutely tiny.
So this is what I will be taking with me on all my travels in the coming year.
Alright that's it for today's vide, if you have any questions please leave them in the
comments section, click like and subscribe!