Hey everyone, my name is Evan Thomas, and in today's video you're going to learn everything
you need to know about the Moza Mini Gimbal for your smartphone.
We're going to unbox it, set it up, go through some specs, balance it, review it and everything
else you need so you can get up and shooting in no time!
The Moza mini-mi is in the same category as the DJI Osmo and the Zhiyun smooth 4, and
it's about the same price as well.
All three are small, compact, affordable, which makes them great for traveling, as they
can fit in almost any size bag.
But there are some features that set these apart and I'll discuss them here in a minute.
The Moza Mini-Mi will work with pretty much any smartphone including the Samsung Galaxy
and Iphone 6 through 10.
I have the iPhone X so that's what we'll be testing with today.
So let's open it up and see what's inside.
The first thing you'll notice is this small, sturdy travel case to protect the device,
and I always say it's very important to keep your gimbals in a hard shell case like this
because the brushless motors can get damaged pretty easily, they're pretty sensitive, highly
specialized motors so if you don't take care of them properly, they can get damaged.
So it's really great this gimbal comes with this.
Let's open up the case and see what's inside.
Inside is the gimbal, the micro fiver cleaning cloth, which I love when brands include these
because I can never get enough of them, charging cable and finally, a tripod, which is an absolute
life saver for getting your gimbal setup, and to use it while you're shooting, this
one feels a little "plasticy", but on the hand it feels sturdy, and it will get the
job done, and I guess it's great that it's light for traveling.
So let's get it setup.
Step 1 is to attach the tripod, it's a 1/4" screw at the bottom, just like that.
And that way we can easily set the tripod on a table or any surface while we're balance
it.
Step 2 is to get your cell phone and attach it to the Moza Mini Gimbal.
And Step 3 is to balance the Moza Mini and right now you can see the gimbal is not balanced
because when I have the camera in the shooting position and I let go, it's turning over,
so to balance the Moza gimbal, we're just going to unscrew this screw here and because
the camera is falling in this direction, I'm going to push it this way to try and center
the gravity of this motor, so I pushed it over, and it's still tilting so I need to
go a little bit more.
There you go, see how it's staying in the middle now?
That's properly balanced, so I'm going to tighten this screw and we can turn on the
gimbal, it's important to balance it, because if it's not balanced the motor might over
heat, the gimbal won't be as stabilized, you'll get some shaky footage, and it's just better
for the battery life of the gimbal because they motors don't have to work as hard to
balance the camera.
So to turn on the gimbal, we just press and hold the power button here, and it comes to
life.
If you haven't already downloaded the iOS app, it's called Moza Genie, you can download
it in the app store now, or you can scan this QR code to do that, if you have an Android
just open up the Google Play store and search for Moza Genie.
So one cool thing about this gimbal that the other competitors don't offer is wireless
charging, so to turn on the wireless charging I just double tap the power button and my
phone will begin to wirelessly charge.
I think this is a great feature that is important when you're out in the field shooting.
You don't have to worry about plugging your phone in and out, the gimbal can charge it.
And there is this battery charging port at the bottom that you can connect a battery
pack to, so imagine it's charging your gimbal and also wirelessly charging your cell phone.
The power levels are here on the left side of the control panel.
A blue solid light at the top means you have between 70 and 100% battery which is good.
A flashing blue light means it's probably time to charge.
The Moza Mini gimbal has eight operating modes which is four more than the DJI Osmo and the
Zhiyun, I don't know if that's necessarily a better thing though, with so many modes
it can get quite confusing flipping between all of them, especially if you're in a hurry
or under stress.
But I'm going to go through a few of the modes now, let's check them out.
To go through all of the different modes, you triple tap or double tap the
left scroll wheel.
So right now I'm in lock mode, or free mode as it's called on some gimbals, so if I pitch
done, or I yaw to the right and left, if I roll, you can see the camera is not moving
at well.
But if I want to turn on yaw follow, I double tap the left button.
Now if I yaw to the right or to the left, or "pan", the camera and the gimbal is following.
If I double tap it again, yaw focus is off and you can see we're back in "lock" or "free
mode."
If I triple tap the left button, now I'm in pitch follow, so if I go down, the camera
is pitching down, if I go up, the camera is pitching up.
If I want to be in yaw follow and pitch follow, I just double tap, so now I have pitch follow
and yaw follow turned on.
If I want to turn on roll follow, I simple long press the left button and now roll follow
is turned on.
So this can give you a dutch angle, if you're familiar with that shooting technique.
Usually the only mode I shoot in is yaw follow.
Before I go any further I would just like to ask a favor from you guys, if you're enjoying
this video please click subscribe, like the video and if you have any questions at all,
please leave them in the comments section below, I get back to EVERY single question
left on my YouTube channel within 48 hours, so please leave me a question.
The manual says if you triple press the top button of the scroll wheel, you enter into
inception mode, which is supposedly some sort of crazy dutch angle, but personally I can't
figure out what it does.
I'm going to triple tap this top button and show you, so the gimbal just sort of goes
up and I don't know what this mode is.
If you know what it is, please leave a comment below and let me know.
So one thing that is great about this gimbal is that you have a joystick that you can use
to move around the camera, should be no surprise.
If you want to return to the center you just double tap the bottom button.
And the gimbal returns to center.
Now I'm going to open up the Moza genie up so I can control the phone with the gimbal
buttons.
So the first thing you need to do is turn on your bluetooth for your phone and just
click the button in the bottom left corner to connect, select the gimbal, and now it
should be connected, so to control the phone with the gimbal you can press this center
button to start recording video.
And I can control the zoom by scrolling with the wheel.
That's a pretty nice feature.
If I want to review footage, Ijust tap once the right button of the scroll wheel.
And if I want to go back I just tap it again.
And now I want to show you guys a feature called object tracking, to get there you just
tap this button in the bottom left hand corner, the third one from the left.
And once I tap that, I can draw a square around whatever I want to track.
And now when move the gimbal, the gimbal should automatically follow the object, and it's
a little bit buggy as you can see, it's not perfect.
And I'm not even going that fast, but it is a pretty cool feature.
And you can see how it's bugging out now, so looks like there needs to be some work
to be done, let me try it again.
Now it's really freaking out.
Now I'm not doing anything.
So object tracking has some work to be done.
Let's try it one more time.
I'm going to go in the kitchen now and try to track something else and see if that works.
Ok so let's try to track this piece of fruit, I'm going to draw a square around it and now
when I walk, it does a pretty good job tracking it, I'm happy with the results actually.
I still think it has a little bit of development to be done in the app, but it's a pretty cool
feature.
I'm going to turn the tracking off and go back to the table.
I think this app is pretty robust, if I tap the top right, I can get all these different
settings.
I can change the video modes, I can go into smart modes and professional modes.
I can change the frames, Id don't want to mess around with it too much.
I can change the quality.
You can also do these various different professional modes, you can reset, you can do live streaming.
You can turn the sound meter on.
You can do filters, turn on the grid, flash, anti-shake.
Frame rate, professional mode, resolution etc.
The Moza Mini also features timelapses and it can also do the vertigo shot because you
can use the scroll wheel.
One thing I get asked a lot is if I can use these various gimbals with apps like ProCam
the native camera in the phone, or some other app, so let's check it out and try.
I'm going to swipe out of here.
And I'm going to press the center button and see if it does anything.
It doesn't look like it's controlling the native video.
But let me try ProCam.
Again I'm pushing and it does not look like the gimbal is supporting any other app besides
the Moza Genie app.
And this can be a negative thing about this gimbal for people that either like to shoot
in the native camera or in an app like ProCam.
This Moza Mini gimbal is pretty great, a lot of people have messaged me and ask me to compare
it to the Zhiyun Smooth 4, so here is a comparison on the screen of some of the features, as
you can see, they're both around the same price, the Moza Mini is a little bit cheaper,
depending on where you live, the Moza can support up to 300 grams, there are eight operation
modes as I said earlier, there's inception mode which I don't think is anything special
and frankly I don't know how to use it.
The wireless phone charging on the Moza Mini is very cool, it's something I wish all the
other smartphone gimbals had.
And they don't, so that to me really makes the Moza Mini stand out.
And on the screen now are some more detailed specs.
One other thing Iike about this gimbal is that it has a standby mode, so instead of
having to turn off the gimbal every time you're not using it, you can just click the power
button one time, and enter standby mode, which saves battery, and time really, because if
you're out running around and you don't need the gimbal, you just hit standby instead of
shutting the whole thing down, and then rebooting it when you need it.
Simply tap the power button and the Moza Mini turns back on.
Press and hold the power button if you really need to shut it down.
Another thing that sets this gimbal apart is that it has various accessory screws, in
the top you have a screw hole if you want to put a mini microphone or a light.
There's one on the bottom here, there's one here of course where the tripod is now, and
there's one here.
So that is another thing that makes it stand out.
Really the wireless charging and the accessory screw holes is something that the other smartphone
gimbals don't have which is something I think is cool.
It does feel a little bit plastically, and light, so it does give me that sort of cheap
feel, compared to say, the DJI Osmo, however it is cheaper, much cheaper than the DJI Osmo.
I think that if you're looking for your first smartphone gimbal and you've never really
used one before, you just need something really cheap, and something you might not mind damaging
because it's for your first time trying one.
It is very user friendly, easy to launch, you can get it setup in minutes.
And it's great for traveling.
And I would recommend it if you're a first time gimbal user and you're just looking for
something to add a little bit more production value in your videos.
As I mentioned earlier, if you have any questions at all, please leave them in the comments
section, if you want to see more tutorials and review videos like this one, click subscribe,
and please click the like button on this video if you enjoyed it.
Thanks for watching my review of the Moza Mini gimbal!