- Hey guys, what's goin' on?
In this video, we're talkin' about how you don't always need
a gimbal to get that silky smooth look
but there's definitely times when you do.
(upbeat music)
So this video is all about ways in which you can get
awesome silky smooth footage without using a gimbal.
Now, gimbals are an awesome piece of equipment,
you can do some really cool stuff but you don't always need
a gimbal and so if you're always defaulting to putting
your camera on a gimbal, you need to start thinking
differently about what it is that you're doing
and come up with some creative ways to move the camera,
to use the camera, because sometimes it's a pain
to put the camera on a gimbal, balance,
maybe in certain situations, you just don't wanna have
that piece of gear out so you need to know
how to use your camera to get those smooth shots
without always having the gimbal.
Now I just got back from an awesome day
of filming with my buddy, Jesse.
We drove up to Malibu, we went and explored,
did some really cool stuff, I played around with
the gimbal, played around without the gimbal as well
but I wanted to show you guys kind of the difference
between using a gimbal and not using a gimbal.
When I was in New Zealand, I brought a gimbal with me
and it ended up staying in my suitcase the entire time.
We were in a bus camping, we had little space,
things were being shifted here and there and I ended up
not wanting to pull out my gimbal and try
to rebalance it and use it all the time.
There was just so many situations where I would rather
just grab my camera and go 'cause we jumped out of the car
on the side of the road, getting some cool shots
or I just was hiking, I didn't wanna bring the extra gear
and after about a week of traveling,
I ended up just ditching the gimbal altogether
because when you're shooting to edit
and you shoot in a certain style, you realize that
you only need a few seconds here, a few seconds there
and if you move the camera in certain ways,
the footage can be smooth and you can still get
that gimbal-like effect.
Okay, so the first thing that will give you smooth footage
is an image stabilizer or a camera stabilizer
so in different cameras, there's different stabilizers,
I shoot on the GH5, it has both a stabilizer
in the body and it also has a stabilizer in the lens
so using your stabilizer, turning those on,
gives you the ability to get smoother footage.
The second part is just how you move.
So when you're walking around with a camera here
and it's bouncing, you're obviously seeing all that shake,
so when you sit down low and you move your body smoothly
in a direction left to right, forwards back, up, down,
you can create the gimbal look where it's very silky smooth
and it's done just by moving your body weight
from one direction to another.
Now when you start taking steps, there's more opportunity
for your camera to be bouncing around
so this really works well when you're doing
these smooth, small shots.
The third thing that will add to giving you
smoother footage is shooting in slow-mo
and that's just one of those things,
the slower your shoot, the easier it is to get smoother
footage because you're basically taking a second
and you're expanding that second into two seconds,
four seconds, eight seconds, depending on what
your camera can shoot so with the GH5, I always shoot 120
so that's four times slower than 30
but this camera can also do 180 which is even slower.
Now I know a lot of your cameras will only do 60
but even at 60, you can still get silky smooth shots
by putting on slow motion and moving your body in a way
where it doesn't have a lot of bounce, a lot of shake.
You gotta brace yourself, you gotta sit down lower,
you gotta do the gimbal walk, which is trying not
to move the camera except for in the plane
of motion that you wanna go.
All right, the fourth tip would be to brace the camera
on something bigger than, say, the camera itself.
So if you have a cage, you have some handles,
that's gonna allow you to hold on to the camera
and make it bigger so when you make a camera bigger,
it moves with less bump and less shake
so cages, handles, you could brace it against your body,
your body's a big object so when you put your camera against
it and you're just shifting your body,
then you're gonna get a smoother shot.
So think of ways that you can expand
the footprint of your camera.
Taking something like a Joby tripod, bending the arms up,
putting your camera on here, now you have more of an object
that you can maneuver and it's not so small
so now you're making it bigger, it's gonna act
like a bigger camera.
And the fifth way that you can make your footage
silky smooth is shooting on wider lenses.
When you shoot on a longer lens, you're gonna see more
of your bounce so the wider you go,
the more ability that you're gonna have.
When you use some of these other techniques together,
you can make that footage look super smooth.
All right and the sixth and kind of final way
that you can get silky smooth footage without
a stabilizer is put yourself on some sort of wheels.
So get roller blades, get a scooter, get some sort
of object that rolls so you don't have that walking motion.
So think of ways that you can incorporate something else
that has wheels so that you can get those smoother shots
not having to have as much bounce.
So when you use all these different techniques
and you use them interchangeably,
you can get really silky smooth footage.
Like I was saying, when I was in New Zealand,
all I used was my body and the camera
and these different techniques, wide lenses, et cetera,
and I was able to always have silky smooth footage.
Now a big part about this is that you're only
gonna be able to use a few seconds of each shot
so if you're shooting, like, B-roll sequences,
this is a great way to get awesome footage,
make it look a lot more cinematic because you have
this footage in it, however, when you start shooting
in real time and you're doing longer takes,
you're gonna notice all the camera bounce
so these six tips that I just gave you work great
when you're cutting short clips, you know,
a few seconds for each shot and then
you're out onto the next clip.
Now, if you need to do longer takes,
if you need to shoot in real time,
this is when a gimbal is needed and so that's
what I was saying at the beginning of this video.
There's times when you don't need a gimbal.
You could shoot a lot of awesome footage if you're cutting
stuff quicker and you're only using a few seconds of it.
So when me and Jesse were out today, I wanted to show you
some different samples of how a gimbal makes such
a difference when you're using it in situations
where you absolutely need it to get
that silky smooth footage.
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So a lot of what I was shooting today,
I shot on a 50mm lens, it's actually a 25 for the GH5
but with the crop, it's a 50 and when you shoot
on a longer lens on a gimbal, you can get these really cool
moving shots that you would never be able to get handheld
and then, on top of it, I was shooting real time
trying to do longer takes and so when you're doing
longer takes, you have to use a gimbal to get
these silky smooth shots 'cause otherwise,
you're just gonna be bouncing around
but the effect that you can get when you're shooting
on a long lens with a gimbal is amazing.
You can get these really cool spiraling shots
around whoever it is that you're filming because
if you're on a good gimbal, you can move without having
to worry about too much camera wobble
or too much camera shake.
So you can just make sure that you have the right distance,
spin around a person, do some really cool, awesome shots.
All right and one last thing, when you're shooting slow-mo
with a gimbal, you can do some unique shots that you won't
be able to get with other cameras.
So, for example, when me and Jesse were up in the cliffs
above Malibu, I was able to run up and down
this hillside and keep him centered the entire time
and I was still able to get these really cool shots
done in slow-motion and you get this kind of drone
looking effect where you're going from up to down,
down to up but because you're using a gimbal,
you're able to not have to worry so much about the shot,
just keep your distance and make sure that your camera's
pointed at him and then you can do
these bigger sweeping shots.
When it's played back and it's in slow-motion,
you get the really cool parallax effect
and that comes from using long lenses.
You see this all the time in major films
when they have a super long lens and they're spinning
around a subject or moving around a subject,
the background's moving faster.
So guys, I'd love to hear your thoughts on using a gimbal.
Definitely, you don't always have to have a gimbal,
it's not a piece of camera equipment that you need
to have in your arsenal but it's something
I definitely like to have for these moments
when I want to get more creative, when I want
to shoot longer lenses or these situations
where I need to have someone talking on camera,
doing longer takes, something done in real time,
definitely a gimbal is the way I go.
All right, guys, that is it.
If you're new to this channel, make sure you hit
that subscribe button, go out there, make some awesome,
cinematic, smooth, silky footage with or without a gimbal.
There's some really cool stuff you can do.
All right, guys, stay tuned, there's some really awesome
stuff coming up before we hit the road, so, guys,
I will see you on the next one.
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