This is my first video of 2020, but we're covering the most
requested topic from 2019 that I never got around to,
which is which fluid head do I recommend.
Let's get undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone,
and the background is real, but I'm CG.
So today, we're going to talk about video heads, and more
specifically, the smaller differences in video heads
in the sub-$500 range and how you can use this information
to make a good purchase decision for your needs.
I've got a few carefully chosen examples here
to demonstrate this. So, first up,
let's start with this one from iFootage, the Komodo K5.
I talked about this head when I reviewed the iFootage monopod.
I loved the monopod but thought the head was
a bit underwhelming for its price tag.
Now, to be fair, since then, it has come down in price
and isn't that bad of a value proposition anymore.
But in either case, let's take a look at what it's missing.
So, a big part of this head's appeal is that it's compact,
but that also means that we're making compromises
on the features of a fluid head that are important.
Those features are mostly about having control,
and this head doesn't give us a lot of it.
There's only two controls for pan and tilt.
The pan is decided by this little knob down here,
which you can tighten and loosen, but it's essentially
just a glorified lock because it doesn't really change
the amount of resistance in a meaningful way.
It has a fixed amount of drag, and while it does get harder
to pan as we near the tightest position, it's not
a usable setting because we're fighting against the lock, which
then creates jumps and doesn't allow for a very smooth shot.
So, it's basically one drag setting and a lock combined.
Now, if you want to know more about how these fluid drag
systems are made or why they're called fluid heads,
Dale, over at the Vistek YouTube channel,
has already published a very informative video on the topic,
so I'll defer to him with a link in the description.
But, for an oversimplified explanation, there's some grease
inside of the cavity between adjustable plates
that control how easily the grease
or fluid can flow through,
and with cheap heads like this one,
its only mechanism for resistance
is by clamping down on those plates
by tightening the knobs.
But when that knob doubles as the lock, I find the amount
of useful positions usually shrinks considerably and often
end up with just a fixed amount of drag like we're seeing here.
Now, the tilt on this head is also controlled by a single
knob, but it's a larger one at least and does have a slightly
more refined control, but again, we only have about 45° of useful
range before we start to feel the lock come in to play,
at which point we require much more effort to start
the motion than to finish it, so we get jerkier movements.
Ideally, you'd want to isolate the lock and drag controls
so that your tilt feels consistent throughout
the movement and you can lock it separately when needed,
which is exactly what you can do with our next head,
the Manfrotto 502.
[rustling]
Now, this head is very popular and it is a pretty solid value,
but it's not perfect. First off, though,
let's look at what it has over the Komodo.
So, for this head, you can lock off the tilt over here if
you want, and then you can also lock of the pan under here.
There's a knob, this one's probably not ideally placed.
One of the complaints about this head is that some people don't
like the position of the locks, but at least it has them.
And then separately, there's a dial over here that
controls the drag of the tilt, and then this whole red ring
down here is what controls the drag for the pan.
And these controls have a reasonably long travel
so that you can be more precise over selecting
the resistance you prefer. And this is important
if you plan of doing a lot of movements that require
simultaneous panning and tilting because if you can't dial in
your resistance to feel natural and similar, you'll get a very
pronounced staircase effect while moving on an angle
because you'll be panning and then tilting
at different rates instead of in a straight line.
So, would I recommend this head?
Yes, especially considering it's still cheaper than
the Komodo is in many places online.
It was only $145 on B&H last time I checked.
And at that price range, it's one of the best options.
Just make sure that you're choosing the one that
corresponds with your tripod because tripods
can have bowls or flat bases.
But this particular head is for a flat tripod, but I believe
it comes in both variations, where the next head we're going
to look at is for a 75mm bowl, which will have, sort of,
a concave socket on the top of the tripod.
Now, there's still a couple of things I don't like about this
head, which you can eliminate if you spend more money.
For example, there's no control over the counterbalance.
You always want to balance your camera on your tripod.
Otherwise, tilting is a much worse experience.
But on a head like this, your only option
is to completely loosen the tilt drag--
[soft crackling] and then slide the plate back and forth until
it doesn't seem to tilt in either direction.
Then, when you increase the tilt drag again, it should
be able to hold itself at an angle without being locked down.
However, this head has a fixed resistance for that because it's
just controlled by a big spring behind this knob.
So, you can't make adjustments based on the weight of your
camera, and you might find that when using too light of rigs,
you'll hear and feel that spring pop while tilting.
And this is worsened by another problem with this head,
which is that some of the older batches had an issue where
that spring had a bit too much play and would
actually slip out of the hole that it was supposed
to be in before jolting back into place.
If you end up with this issue, I would suggest swapping out
the head, but for me, since mine wasn't returnable,
I fixed it by jamming a washer in there to reduce it's movement
so it would stay positioned in the recess, but otherwise,
it kind of kicks out and then when you tilt back in,
you can feel that kind of plunk back in, like, a spring sound.
For those that have never balanced a camera rig on
a video head before, let me show you how to do it.
So, you take your camera. Now, I have one here
that doesn't really require that difficult a balancing 'cause
it's pretty boxy. And we'll put it into our,
we'll slide the quick release in, I mean, and then once
we're in, what we want to do is loosen off the ability to slide
the quick release back and forth. Here, let me position
this on the side so you can see a little bit better.
And we'll make sure that we don't have our tilt lock on.
And then, as you can see, it's not really moving now.
Huh, it is drooping a little bit by the handle, but not a lot,
and that's because our drag is all the way up.
So, if we loosen our drag all the way down,
then now, any movement at all on the camera,
much like balancing a gimbal, will, you can see
how lose it is, will let you know if it's balanced.
So we want to have the camera in a position where,
when we let go, it doesn't really tilt either way.
This is pretty good here, 'cause we can see the handle's
not moving. If we were too far forward, well then, it would do
that, and that's another reason why you want to make sure you
have locking plates so that the camera doesn't slide out.
But you can see, now we're too far forward because if
I let go, it does that. So just slide that back
until it doesn't seem to tilt in either direction, and then you
lock down the position of the plate so that it can't move.
And then check it, and we're good, and now,
you can tighten up your, uh, tilt drag again so that when you
do tilt, you can let go of it, and it should hold itself in
that place even though we still haven't engaged the tilt lock.
And now, it's perfectly balanced.
And if we tilt it up, it should hold,
and it should even be able to do pretty extreme examples
and have it still stay perfectly, you know,
where it's not tilting in another direction.
And then this means it's balanced, and this is going to
give your tilts much easier control, because as you can see,
I barely had to put any pressure on it,
which is the opposite of what I was saying about
the Komodo where there's, kind of, like, a getting started,
like, an acceleration you have to get over.
You have to push a little bit harder, and then it starts
to move, which means that the beginning of your movement
is completely useless, and you're only going to have,
sort of, that sweet spot in the middle.
This brings up an important point, though,
which is to check the weight range for the counterbalance.
If it says something like 10 kilos or 20 lb,
and you're only using small mirrorless setups,
you'll probably have difficulties using that head,
and you'd want to find one optimized for lighter payloads.
However, many of the premium, more expensive heads
will have weight ranges that go all the way down to zero
or just 2 to 3 lbs, and then up to 20 lbs, allowing
you to employ a range of camera configurations to success,
like our next head here, the E-Image GH06.
Now, this head steps up in price considerably to $499,
but it's the best value head available for the money in my
opinion because you're getting performance that would
usually cost you $1,200 from the competition, and it doesn't
have any of the issues we've talked about thus far.
Now, this is a 75mm bowl head like I was talking about.
So, I'm going to place it in this tripod over here
and then we'll talk about some of the features.
[latches clacking]
[tripod rattling]
[gear clicking]
So, first off, to deal with that counterbalance issue
we just talked about, it has a dial ranging from
1 kg to about 6 kg of counterbalance support,
with a maximum recommended payload of about 13 lbs.
But, it also has a zero counterbalance setting,
which is handy for finding that balance point
of your camera rig or plate position.
It also has numerical stops for the pan
-and tilt drag controls-- -[gear clicking]
making it much easier than even the Manfrotto
to choose matching resistances and for easily
remembering what position you like.
If you became a fan of #2, well, you don't have to
find a comfortable setting by finessing a dial each time.
-You just set them to two-- -[clicking]
the next time you go to shoot.
And the locks are separated, of course, and they aren't
the more tedious dial kind but rather more of a lever.
You can see one over here that goes from unlocked
to firmly locked in place.
It also features a nice touch by allowing the quick release plate
to be snapped in rather than being forced to slide through.
You just put it in on the side and then --
-[plate snapping] -push it down, and it snaps
into place. And best of all, these plates
are Manfrotto standard, so you can interchange them with your
other heads or your gimbals etc. Now, like I was saying earlier,
there are other heads that I like, like Miller or Sachtler,
but they cost about 2.5 times as much as this E-Image GH06.
So for me, this is the best bang for the buck
fluid head available, which answers the question
that I said was the most requested question from 2019.
But as a general rule, you can get a better deal on the head
if you buy it with tripod legs, and in the case of the E-Image,
you can get this $500 head with these $500 set of carbon
fibre legs for about $700 combined, which is probably
one of the best combo deals going, considering I paid $450
for my Manfrotto combo that only came with
your standard aluminum photo legs.
Now, I don't want to bog this video down with a whole
section on tripod legs, so I'll just give you
a couple of quick notes. But something to look for,
right off the bat, is having your legs be controlled
by a single clamp or knob rather than one for each stage.
This tripod, for example, the GC752,
allows you to drop both stages by just turning this top knob.
[latch sliding]
This will save your back if you've got a heavy rig on
here because you won't have to be constantly bending over
to release the lower buckles to level or lower your camera.
That would be the defining difference, in my opinion,
between good video sticks and photography sticks.
And it's definitely worth the extra money.
And this will give you two ways to easily level a setup like
this. You can either do a quick change in height on one segment
or by adjusting the bowl and then levelling off that way.
And of course, there's a bubble level included on the head
so you can make sure everything is in order.
But while we're on the topic of photography, let's quickly cover
the other types of heads and their usefulness for video.
One of the most common is the ball head.
And I'm using one of these right now on my overhead rig.
And these are great when you only need a fixed position,
but that position might need to be on a slight angle or tilted
on-axis that your standard pan and tilt can't provide.
They're also quite useful for sliders if you plan to do
vertical slides because they allow you to put your camera
easily into portrait mode because these heads are ideal
for photography, and then you can do your vertical slides
like this while controlling what angle the camera is facing.
There is another photography head,
however, that is slightly more useful for sliders
than even the ball head, and that's the pan-tilt head.
Now, this might sound a lot like a video head,
but the main difference is it's not made for camera movement,
so it doesn't the fluid drag controls or counterbalance,
and it also has the ability to tilt horizontally
as well for when you want to go dutch or again when
doing vertical slides and you want to flip
the camera quickly into portrait orientation.
The difference over a ball head is that these
can support more weight and have more refined control
because they can't just move in all directions,
so they're easier to keep perfectly level.
And this one here from Manfrotto conveniently
has bubble levels on each access.
So overall, these heads are great for static positions,
but I wouldn't use them for camera movement.
Alright, so I think that's about it.
This is a huge topic, obviously, and we could
spend several videos just discussing
the different aspects like carbon fibre vs. aluminum,
or the different quick release plates, etc.
What I'm hoping, however, is that this video helped you
figure out what aspects are important to you
so that you can make a more informed buying decision.
Something to consider, though, is that tripods and heads
generally last a lot longer than the rest of your camera gear,
so don't be afraid to spend more than you might have wanted to
because it will be cheaper, in the long run,
to buy a quality system once instead of buying less
expensive systems that don't satisfy all of your needs,
multiple times throughout the years.
-[beeping] -Bending over to release
the lower buckles to level lolo--
[garbling comically]
-[beeping] -And there is a higher level
-of precision for sure, eh-- -[sighing]
-[beeping] -Because you won't
-have to be cons-- -[clicking]
-[beeping] -Difference between
-a good video-- -[beeping]
Bend over so much if you have a heavy ring on--
-[beeping] -[latch rustling]
[silence]
[latch rustling]
[beeping] But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this
video entertaining or at least helpful. And if you did, make
sure you leave it the old thumbs up and consider subscribing
if you haven't already. But if you did not find this
video helpful or entertaining, then it might be time
to put down that gorilla pod.
Alright... I'm done.