MoVI – the future of camera stabilization?

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by Nino LeitnerApril 6^th, 2013

Everyone who operates video cameras knows that there is one major thing to consider before you can start shooting: stabilization. There are countless ways of stabilizing your camera – a simple tripod, a (shoulder) rig system (necessary for handheld shots if your camera has a form factor that makes it impossible to put it on the shoulder without additional pieces of equipment) – all the way up to Steadicams, jibs, cranes, sliders and so on, if you want to move that camera.

MōVI from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

MoVI in action

And now the world is richer with another possibility to stabilize cameras, the MoVI, a digital 3-axis gyro-stabilized handheld camera gimbal – produced by Freefly Systems in Seattle, WA.

Vincent Laforet had a chance to shoot a test short with one, and published an extremely impressive resulting film. Including the behind-the-scenes footage, which is extremely revealing on how they managed to pull off many of the difficult shots, for example a “hand-over” of the camera rig while rolling at the same time.

MōVI BTS from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

According to Vincent, the learning curve on this is very low compared to other solution like a a Steadicam, so you should be able to shoot with MoVI within a very short time. The small form factor and weight also do are unheard of for devices in this category – which in turn allows many uses for it that have been unthinkable with other solutions.

Pricing wise we are looking at around $15,000 for the M10 (which takes up to 10 pounds), and around $7,500 for the M5 (for smaller rigs). While the M10 is already shipping, the M5 is not available yet.

cinema5D will be attending NAB of course, and one of our priorities will be getting a nice video hands-on with the makers of MoVI, who are filmmakers themselves.

What do you think? Is this really a “game changer” as Vincent pronounced?

MoVI M10

via Vincent Laforet