YouTuber Armando Ferreira recently was approached by Zhiyun and asked to take a look at the high-performance Crane 3S. He decided to do something a little different and take his Canon C500 MKII and rig it using the Crane 3S and a few other “accessories” to a moving jeep and try and capture cinematic looking motorcycle moves on the road.
Capturing high-quality car chases for Hollywood style production is something that requires typically not just a lot of experience but also very expensive gear (think tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars or more). You need to be able to compensate for the movement of the vehicle and be able to safely carry a heavy camera and capture everything on the go while communicating with the moving driver and nailing focus.
Can Ferreira rig his own C200 to a Jeep and using a gimabl plus a few other components get a Hollywood level results? well, you should be the judge of that but watching the experience was certainly interesting.
The point of this video was to see if the Crane 3S can handle the though mission of handling a C500 MKII on a moving car and it can and apparently the motors even got some power to spare (at least when connected in the back of the car – in the front they will have to handle strong winds as well). What you do need to remember and might not be emphasized enough in the video is that even if the Crane 3S is only a $650 unit which is really amazing compared to what some of the truly professional heavy-duty gimbals cost, it isn’t enough on its own for such a task.
You will need some sort of a shock-absorbing arm (or a car with very high-quality shock absorbers, or both) to handle up and down movements. These types of systems are very expensive and the one used on the Jeep for this video is made by FLOWCINE and cost over $8000, so this isn’t as if the Crane 3S on its own is enough to get the shots that you have seen.
Focusing on the Crane 3S, it seemed to perform very well with one issue that can be fixed in firmware being the control interface on the smartphone being displayed in the wrong orientation when connected to a monitor (maybe Ferreira could have just connected the smartphone below the monitor to solve this issue?).
We doubt that the Crane 3S is going to replace the gimbals used in professional chase cards in Holywood any time soon but it is possible that DIY chase cars would be more accessible to indy filmmakers from now on.
You can find more photography-related technology videos on our photo-tech section here on LensVid.
Iddo Genuth 
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