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 stabilizer 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 a 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 and 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 5 minutes of me carrying through the woods. So I went out and had a look and bought a gimbal. That's G-I-M-B-A-L, which is a motion stabilizer. Now you'll have seen these motion stabilizers 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, and then that will be in a harness so that if they're tracking the soccer player, for example, or 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 stabilizer, and not because I think I'm particularly professional, but if I'm going to take any videos of people moving or of me moving and filming, then I need to solve this problem. And I mention this because if you're looking at creating video content, for example, on location, even at an event, then a stabilizer 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 3, and this particular piece of kit has a handle which feels a bit like the handle of a pistol, and you hold that, 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 gimbal, into the cradle there, and then you turn on the gimbal. It only weighs 400 grams, the gimbal, so it's not heavy. And it's, you know, very easy even for small hands to use. And on the Osmo, the DJI model that I bought, you can have phones that are as small as these, for example, the iPhone 6, and I've got an XS Max. So it just reaches that with an 88mm wide and up to 9.5mm 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. Then you 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 thumb dial, a bit like you would, for example, on a helicopter pilot's joystick. So you have one button that you can move, that you can rotate, and 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 pan 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 an absolutely silent motor, so there's no noise that's emitted from the gimbal that would actually appear on your, um, 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've Found this actually quite inspiring. So one of the cool functions of the Mobile 3, which is an upgrade from the Mobile 2, is that it recognizes a palm and it recognizes a V gesture. And what this means is that you can actually film yourself because it comes with a 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'll 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, and 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 3 times. There are several different ways then to move between the front and the rear camera on the DJI Osmo 3. So it makes it very flexible. So I'm quite happy, to be honest, with how this works. Also, it's compact. The Osmo 3 is foldable, makes it nice and small. I bought this one because the 2 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 3, 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 grams, so you can actually carry that around for a full 5, 10, even 15 minutes without getting 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 four. So the one, two, and recently introduced four. 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 ninety nine pounds. On Amazon, there's another one that has been profiled by the New York Times called the Zhiyun. They're all Chinese, and and that is again just about $100. It's £80. And there's another one called a Hohem, which is £87 on Amazon. So the gimbals are all at just about £100 or less. But it's worth, in my view, paying more and not less, because once you've paid £80, if you don't get the functionality, it can render the piece of equipment useless. So for an extra £10 or £15, 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, a kind of grading where you're changing the coloring of the video itself already on the phone, all 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, uh, 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, uh, 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, edit it 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, $120. You can create professional quality videos so you no longer have the shaky hand, uh, 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 thinking 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 stabilize the image, and that's called a gimbal. So thanks so much for listening to this episode of Speak 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 at eastwestpr.com. Or if you're interested in a mastermind, check out the Speak PR Mastermind at speakpr.co. 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. Use a gimbal. Thanks so much again for listening.