Cell phone video from the boat with a gimbal?

[Horton]

Anybody tried this? My guess is the high-frequency shaking in the boat would overwhelm any consumer gimbal but I'm curious.

[epnault]

Horton. I have really good results with a hard mounted (no gimbal required) iphone on the pylon using an image stablilizer app named MoviePro $5.99

[ColeGiacopuzzi]

DJI OSMO POCKET

 

I don't know about that, but this looks really rad.

 

[Jibbo]

Tried a number of gimbals. The following mode is too slow to keep up with a skier. Talked with gimbal manufacturers and the more you try and speed up the follow mode the less stable the motion is. So manufacturers are not keen to make the gimbal less stable to just speed up the gimbal.

[bojans]

I have an Osmo Mobile 2 and had planned on trying to attach it to our Wake Eye last year, never happened. It does work great when someone hold the gimble and follows the skier.

[Orlando76]

I made a mount out of pvc that slipped over the pylon and the rope passes through it. Phone was mounted above rope inbetween two pieces of wood routed and sandwiched with all thread. Ugly as sin but worked great. Trick was to put a stabilizer eye that the rope passed through. I mounted the eye a bit high so the rope would put pressure on it and stabilized it. Never had an issue using the standard video mode zoomed in a notch or two.

[Obrienslalom]

Haven't tried it for skiing, but does an awesome job taking boat footage before and after. I'm in public water, so random waves always make videos look terrible. I guess I'm comparing shots with waves, not 'high frequency shaking', but they seem super smooth.

 

One feature that's interesting to me more than the shaking is whether the smooth panning along the xaxis would help on something like a wakeeye. It's kept up fairly well on the few handheld tests my wife had done with friends, but nobody is skiing at course speeds. You can normally turn that axis off, but it may solve some of the aggressive yanking during the turn.

 

I have a hohem isteady for my GoPro 5 (<$100 gimbal). Mine has a joystick control, which wouldn't do a good job at all for skiing, too slow. The idea behind the GoPro 7 is that you don't need a gimbal. Curious how well that works too.

[gyoung]

@epnault does the MoviePro app get rid of the distortion caused by the pylon vibrating?

[lpskier]

KMy son in law has a gimbal gnu for a GoPro. It appears as though I can attach it to a Ski Doc Camera Mount and looks like it may work pretty well, but I haven’t tried it.

[epnault]

@gyoung yes!

 

[sodbuster88]

@epnault I assume you’re using a later generation model iPhone (6 or newer) with the newer image stabilization s/w that can’t handle the vibration. I’m really intrigued by this MoviePro app....sounds like a winner.

[MISkier]

@epnault, can you post some video using MoviePro from the pylon? Which version of iPhone are you using?

 

@Jibbo, would the Wakeye app use the settings in MoviePro or are those not in force for the camera interface that Wakeye uses? Could future versions of the Wakeye app have an optional interface to MoviePro to combine the GPS on/off with the enhanced control over video quality. I use an iPhone SE, which seems to have far better video than later models, but it could always be better. Controlling the settings like MoviePro does might help.