• Material: Aluminum + composite plastic
• Max height: 40cm (with tripod)
• Max load bearing: 3kg

Not recommended.

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I shot this last August. I got Flow Motion v2 hack and shot this 720p/50fps.

Thank´s all working around these amazing hacks :)!

FLYCAM NANO - £85

Initial setup for the Nano took around 3-4 hours, and was not a plesant experience. This would have been exaggerated by my lack of experience at the time with stabilisers but i had researched the concept and watched numerous videos on how to tune one and yet i was amazed at how difficult it was. Having spent nearly 6 months with the Nano, i found myself never truly able to get a perfectly tuned setup. It would work sometimes and then it would be placed on a table ready for the next shot and when picked up again it was out of balance. This would take some 2-3 minutes to sort out and sometimes I missed vital shots and had to abandon and go for the monopod. I must admit that laterally i ended up resorting to a rather crude method of balancing it, due to frustration, and this consisted of banging it until it was back in balance. I realise that this method ultimately knackered the whole unit but i was initially very patient with it.

• PROS - Lightweight & Cheap
• CONS - Difficult to adjust, not well built, weights at the bottom over complicate things (combined with little movement in the main shaft available)

WONDLAN MINI STABILIZER - £205

Of course, this lead to me purchasing a new stabiliser which after reading a lot of good things about Wondlan led me to purchase their Mini Stabiliser for just over £200. Being cheaper than the carbon model and smaller i thought this would be ideal for the GH3 + 12-35 lens. I am not joking when I say this, but from open box to flying... less than 5 minutes. I was amazed at how easily the unit could be adjusted and yet how stiff everything felt on it. I can literally run as fast as I can with this thing, place it down, pick it up and nothing changes. I have combined it with a Calumnet quick mount adaptor (manfrotto copy) and this works a treat at allowing me to jump from monopod to stabilizer and at the very most I have to do about 10-15 seconds of tweaks to get it perfect. The knobs at the side allow micro millimeter precision and with the scale at the side does not lead to subjective changes. What a fantastic bit of kit and it has re-ignited my enthusiasm for stabiliser shots once again!

• PROS - Super easy to adjust, well made, looks fantastic (more professional IMO), massive amount of adjustment in both gimbal, shaft height and plate
• CONS - Twice the price, bag is not padded (i'm scraping the barrel here)

I hope this helps with someone looking to take the leap into the world of stabilizers and not sure where to start.

The short story: 31-OCT, the day the Portuguese Budget for 2013 was approved. People gathered in front of the Parliament to say we're being governed by thieves. Not very original I know, but it's a great place to shoot video and take pictures (well at last until it degenerates into mayhem which is rare around this parts but not unheard of until very recently). This is how I worked it.

1) The extremely simple setup:

GH2, screen folded back as a monitor, Transcend 32GB class 10, Samyang 7.5mm fisheye (my favorite video lens), set and forget to hyperfocal, ISO 400 I believe, SS=1/25s. Flowmotion 2 was used as I never know before hand how much video I'm going to capture or how many photos I'll be shooting, so I need something that is very good quality but doesn't make me have to change cards when something very important is happening. If the card is pre-formatted (the extended, not the quick format) it has never failed me to span.

2) The capture:

This is all about getting there up front and trying not to shake the camera. The police until very recently (and only after a 1h stone shower) has been instructed not to charge, so it's an easy job, you just dodge the TV reporters and other amateurs like me. So, here's my first mistake: the aperture is fine, this lens is sharp as an axe, but should have upped the ISO and set a faster SS because in these situations you are always bound to get bumped and it shows in wobbles after software stabilization.

3) Defishing the Samyang:

Load the MTS into AE. Export as image sequence. Use a batch (http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/69869#Comment_69869) to defish the images and import the output again to AE now as image sequence. The defishing was done using the Panini projection. It's loads more natural on people than Rectilinear, it preserves a lot more corner resolution and still manages to keep a few lines straight. This was the first export and not reasonably quick because the synthesis part takes it's toll: ~2-3fps.

4) Stabilizing:

Throw AE's Warp Stabilizer on the footage. Set the "Smoothness" to 15-25% (it will require much less cropping later) set borders to "Stabilize, Synthesize Edges" (again a lot less cropping) but drop the "Synthesis Input Range" to 0,2s otherwise you'll bog AE. In this kind of footage there is usually little point in using a higher value. Skim the footage looking for black borders and try to resize and reframe it so that they don't become evident. Note: defishing after stabilizing should make more sense as you would have more image to work with (defishing crops it) but from a few rough tries, the AE stabilization isn't clearly as effective when working on fisheye footage. This was the second export and a very long one: below 1fps.

5) CC & Denoising:

Used some of ColorGHear's gears, notably GHrain killer to kill a bit of noise and blockiness, but the footage was already very clean from the start and little color correction was used, just a little bit of levels adjusment. This was the third export and I believe it was even longer than the third due to the noise reduction filters: below 0.5fps.

6) The "so long" part: video effects, tracking and subtitling:

Translations were pretty quick, the hard and long part (at least until I found out how to smooth it) was tracking. It was fastidious to track people's features, takes a long time and needs constant review and adjustment. In the end I found out a few tricks (like increasing the tracking area) and smoothing the tracking points. This eased the job a lot and gave much better results. In the end I had to do it sometimes up to 3x until I was satisfied with it. In the process I had to learn a lot about tracking, smoothing, 3D objects, texting, transitions and light sources. This was the forth, the quickest and last export, probably around 10fps.

7) Audio mixing.

This was the part I was more ignorant about, but turned out to be pretty simple. Even though it's pretty rough, the footage is little demanding with so much crowd noise. It was as simple as importing the last video export from AE into Premiere, importing the original sound, importing also "Le Tigre - Dike March 2001" cutting and pasting a few pieces of this track and adjusting the volume here and there to serve the original events while leaving the words of the protesters audible when needed and off I was to the final export.

The resulting video can be found here:

Here are a few pictures of the event.

Anything more you may want to know about any part of the process I'll be glad to detail it.

You can get yours also at http://www.amazon.com/Opteka-SteadyVid-Stabilizer-Camcorders-Supports/dp/B007FDE4Y8/