Why you need a Gimbal if you're making social media movies.

Hello, my name is Jim James, welcome to this episode of speak PR. Today we're going to talk about the gimbal. Not the character from Pulp Fiction, but the gimbal, which is the motion stabiliser, that I found really useful for when I'm making short videos or when I'm streaming video on live to Facebook, for example, or to LinkedIn. Now quite often when we're taking still shots, we've got lots of opportunities to go back and edit. But when we're taking film, especially if we're doing live streaming, then the motion that we have, especially if we're moving can be really disruptive. And during lockdown, I started the practice of taking my mobile phone out into the countryside here in England in a place called bath and filming the the woods and the fields and the birds. I was doing this for those people stuck in lockdown because I felt those people who couldn't get out might like a little bit of peace, a little bit of countryside. But of course, what I found was that the motion of me walking made the video almost really unwatchable. So whoever came with me would end up feeling pretty much seasick after five minutes of me carrying through the woods. So I went out and had a look and bought a gimbal that GM ba L which is a motion stabiliser. Now you'll have seen these motion stabilisers, if you see the behind the scenes movie takes, and the cameraman will be carrying one of these. And especially you also see this when you look at for example, sporting events, there'll be someone with a video camera mounted onto a suspension cage, then that will be in a harness so that if they're tracking the soccer player, for example, the golf player, as they're moving, the viewer isn't seeing all the motion of the person who's actually carrying the camera. So I had a look at getting myself a mobile videography, stabiliser and not because I think I'm particularly professional. But if I'm going to take any videos of people moving or me moving and filming, then I need to solve this problem. And I mentioned this because if you're looking at creating video content, for example, on location, even at an event, then a stabiliser could be a really good investment. Now, the gimbal works in a pretty simple way, there's some gyroscopes inside. And just like on your mobile phone. Now they're all of course software gyros, but the gimbal that I purchased was a DJI Osmo Mobile three. And this particular piece of kit has a handle which feels a bit like the handle of a pistol in your whole debt. And then it has a swing arm, which is foldable and that swings up. And you place the phone into the swing arm much as you would into the cradle, for example, on a car phone device. So you snap your phone into the into the gimbal into the cradle there. And then you turn on the gimbal it only weighs 400 grammes, the gimbal says not heavy. And it's, you know, very easy for small hands to use. And on the Osmo, the DJI model that I bought, you can have phones that are smaller these, for example, the iPhone six, and I've got an Xs max. So it just reaches that with a 88 millimetre wide and up to nine and a half millimetre thick phone. So you can pretty much get the largest mobile phone into this Osmo cradle. And with that phone tucked onto the cradle, you can move it around the U turn on the gimbal. And it connects via Bluetooth to the phone. And there's an app that you have on the phone and you open up the app. And what happens then is that the gimbal becomes the control device for the phone took me a moment or two to get the hang of this at the beginning I was trying to operate the phone separately to the gimbal. But they really are connected to one another with the Bluetooth. And so on the joystick of the gimbal. You have a a thumb dial a bit like you would for example on a helicopter pilots joystick so you have one button that you can move that you can rotate That will then pan left, right, up and down. And there's a little motor in the gimbal, that basically moves the camera. And it moves the camera 180 degrees, so that you can track and move things. Even when you keep your hand still. The camera also tilts forwards and backwards. So you can be filming the floor and pair up to the sky, for example. Or you can do a panorama from left to right, and be panning up and down at the same time. So it's an articulated joint, which is powered by absolutely silent motor, so there's no noise that's emitted from the gimbal that would actually appear on your, on your device on the recording. And what the app does, then is to give you a number of quite different and quite cool functions. And I found this actually quite inspiring. So one of the cool functions of the mobile three, which is an upgrade from the mobile to is that it recognises a palm, and it recognises a V gesture. And what this means is that you can actually film yourself because it comes with the tripod stand, and you can walk and it'll track you. And when you put your palm up, it will stop the device moving and hold the frame. It do the same with V gestures if you do the victory with your fingers. So the the MIMO app, as it's called, has some gesture control functions. So the camera is looking at you doing the gesturing if you're in front of the camera, not holding the camera, and you can command the camera from a distance. So that's really nice. That's one of the features that's worth paying for, I think you also have the ability on the hardware on the joystick itself to zoom in and out on the camera. So that's a really nice function because obviously, what you don't want to be doing is touching the camera and trying to use the screen, you control the zoom by going in and out of the camera using the gimbal trigger. Now on the trigger, which is on the front of our joystick, you can click to transition between portrait and landscape, for example, so if you hit the button, which is the M button, you can switch between landscape and portrait. But also you can rotate the axis yourself manually. You can also then quickly press the trigger three times or several different ways then to move between the front and the rear camera on the DJI Osmo three makes it very flexible. So I'm quite happy to be honest with how this works. Also, it's compact the Osmo three is foldable makes it nice and small. I bought this one because the two doesn't fold which means you've got this slightly strange, almost like a small coat hanger in your pocket. But when you fold the articulated arm of the mobile three, it really becomes small enough to put in your coat pocket. It actually comes with quite a nice convenient box that you can carry things around in. So I'm quite a fan of how the packaging there has worked. What I also found was that the weight of it is not too great at 400 grammes. So you can actually carry that around for a full 510 even 15 minutes without giving any arm ache. Now the Osmo products come from the DJI company which is headquartered in Shenzhen. And DJI is one of the leaders in building drones as well. So actually DJI has a lot of gimbal offerings actually now for to the one two and recently introduced for in fact they've got but there's also another product where they have the camera in the gimbal itself. Now in terms of costs, you can be looking at the gimbal that I bought was just 99 pounds on Amazon. There's another one that has been profiled by the New York Times called dizzied z Yun. They're all Chinese. And that is again just about $100 and 80 pounds. And there's another one called a hoe him which is 87 pounds on Amazon. So the gimbals are all just about Are 100 pounds or less. But it's worth in my view paying more and not less. Because once you've paid 80 pounds, if you don't get the functionality, it can render the piece of equipment useless. So for an extra 10 or 15 pounds, you can get a piece of kit that really works well. Now the the DJI app has got the opportunity as well to create mini movies on it. It has some stylistic renderings, so you can film and actually edit the video. And do for example, kind of grading where you're changing the colouring of the video itself already on the phone. Or in basically real time while you're on location doing the filming using the gimbal. Now what's kind of cute then is you can make films using the gimbal. And then in the software on the phone, you've got some opportunities then to do things like editing them together. Now the big focus on the app is around storytelling and story creation. So what they do is they have a large number of videos that come to you in the app itself to kind of show you how other people are creating content. But then it also allows you to create your own by using the AI editor as it's called. So you could have, for example, some photographs already on your device, you could have gone out and taken some shots, you could have some legacy content that you took already, for example. And then you could be making some content on site. And you could blend all that in. And the the app has the ability to do rendering, but also adds in, for example, music clips into the background for you. So when you create all this content, edited all down, it'll mix audio track. And then of course, you can export that as a video file. And use one of the amplification platforms to send that to, for example, your Vimeo or your YouTube account. So the gimbal is a really useful piece of kit for less than 100 pounds, hundred $120 you can create professional quality videos, so you no longer have the the shaky hand. And if you like the sort of comedy, amateur looking videos, it makes them all look really professional really quickly. So I really recommend you think about that if you want to create videos where you're actually moving or the subject matter is moving. And for me, I found it opens up a category of content that I couldn't make before. And that is actually much more compelling. Because if I'm on the move, and the content is on the move, this is much more interesting than the static photograph in a static location. So recommend if you're creating video content, you invest in a piece of kit that helps you to stabilise the image and that's called a gimbal. So thanks so much for listening to this episode of speak PR. Again, hope you found this of use. If you like it, please do rate it really helps. If you'd like to share this with people that you know that also helps. And if you'd like to have a regular email from us on a Friday, we send out our cognition newsletter. You can sign up for that East West pr.com or if you're interested in mastermind, check out the speak PR mastermind at speak br.com My name is Jim James, thank you so much for listening. I hope that wherever you are, you're safe, that your business is profitable. And that if you're going to be making movies, make them good ones user Kimball, thanks so much again for listening