As you may know, I've had the DIY steadicam woes for a while (read: years). I finally settled on a Glidecam-esque design that, while not solid, served its purpose. I used it with varying degrees of success, but anything more than walking (I often run, and I mean run, with it) required me to use the Deshaker plugin on virtualdub, which meant re-encoding before editing and cropping the frame to hide the compensation artifacts left behind by Deshaker.
Some footage I could get would be perfect after running it through Deshaker, while other footage is still noticeably shaky or poorly compressed (don't judge the videos too hard
):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwe04CxBxp0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjnL7pjvGZ0
All in all, the situation wasn't ideal. In addition to those problems in post-production, the steadicam itself always seemed have parts twist, break, fall apart, or otherwise suck at the most inconvenient times.
No longer! I finally got a "real" stedicam (Merlin-style), with machined parts, cohesive design, and a symmetrical frame
Bottom line, if you go DIY on something like this you will learn a lot and get frustrated a lot. It's a great place to start out, but not a great place to stay. When you outgrow crappy equipment (but not until you do), improve it. And sometimes that means actually buying something
Some footage I could get would be perfect after running it through Deshaker, while other footage is still noticeably shaky or poorly compressed (don't judge the videos too hard
):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwe04CxBxp0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjnL7pjvGZ0
All in all, the situation wasn't ideal. In addition to those problems in post-production, the steadicam itself always seemed have parts twist, break, fall apart, or otherwise suck at the most inconvenient times.
No longer! I finally got a "real" stedicam (Merlin-style), with machined parts, cohesive design, and a symmetrical frame
Bottom line, if you go DIY on something like this you will learn a lot and get frustrated a lot. It's a great place to start out, but not a great place to stay. When you outgrow crappy equipment (but not until you do), improve it. And sometimes that means actually buying something
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