20 ways to use your gimbal

Published on January 22, 2019

Cinematography & Filmmaking

Benro, Camera Movement, Gimbal

Last Tuesday we already started working on this video. For the change, we decided to film at a parking lot. The low ceilings, many poles and lines on the ground make it very interesting to travel in that space with a gimbal. Unfortunately, after filming for several hours, the security popped up and forced us to delete all the footage. Apparently it wasn’t legal to film at the parking of the local mall.

We are not sure what the laws are, but just to avoid any future problems we decided to format the cards. I had a solution in mind while doing this though. A while back, Lorenzo accidentally formatted an SD card. But with the help of a data recovery software, I was able to recover everything. But, for some reason it didn’t worked this time.

So we had to start from scratch and film everything all over again. Looking back on it, it wasn’t a big problem. Yesterday we had beautiful winter weather here in Belgium. A clear open sky, low sunlight and a frozen landscape. Since the frost was melting, there was this amazing fog in the air through which the sun was shining. Oh, I love these days!

Benro RedDog

Benro, our long time sponsor, sent us another great product. This time we’re looking at the RedDog, a 3-axis gimbal stabilizer. It’s not just any other gimbal on the market. Benro did a great job by making it affordable. It’s about 1/3th  of the price of a Ronin S. I can’t say if it’s better as I haven’t tried the Ronin S yet, but I do have experience with about 10 other gimbals. This Benro RedDog, definitely stands out!

For starters, it works like it should and it didn’t gave us any problems, which a lot of the gimbals I worked with did have. What I usually don’t like about gimbals is that most of them are upright. Holding weight like that can never be stable. The RedDog is also designed upright, BUT it comes with a function to twist the handle into their Carry Mode, making the gimbal hang.