Stabilised cameras - good for aerial photography?

It turns out there is a whole pile of these things out there e.g. Lanparte

They differ in that some are just stabilisers (no phone app needed so works with anything) and they differ in how much power they have and some don’t work with larger phones. The Smooth-C has been reviewed as not having much power.

I ordered the Osmo Mobile.

I have had a play with the DJI Osmo Mobile.

It works really well, but with a lot of caveats. The good stuff first:

• Good build quality
• It stabilises well, even with the Samsung S7 which is one of the heavier phones
• Changes in direction are fairly natural; little need to use the panning joystick
• Their phone app can use an external SD card (with some nontrivial config)
• No need to use their phone app at all (what most people will do if they have a decent phone, because e.g. the stock S7 camera app is way better quality)

The bad stuff:

• The controls (except the joystick) work only if you run their phone app
• Their phone app is frankly rubbish; the sort of crippled stuff which Sony do these days e.g. no config for video bitrate and framerate and at 1080P it is 17mbits/sec and 30fps which produces pretty substandard quality movies compared to what a decent phone can do (50mbits/sec and 60fps)
• It won’t grip a phone which is in a case, even a 1mm thick case (one could remove a foam pad to fix this)
• Rubbish user manual
• They have a sensor to detect a phone is in place before powering the gimbals; this doesn’t work so I got it working by sticking some tape over it

I will try to do a flying (in-cockpit) video when I get a chance.

In short, due to their crippled camera app, there is no advantage of this product over one which stabilises as well but which has no app and no buttons to communicate with an app.

When shooting with the S7’s own camera app, I also tried disabling the stabilisation there. This is fine because the gimbal stabilisation is very good, and you get the benefit of the movie having the same (wider) angle of view as you get with stills (in movie mode, the camera stabilises by using a portion of the sensor, and moving this around according to MEMS gyro signals) but if you do a movie while walking it looks a bit weird because, unless you learn the weird bent-knee walking method shown in their videos, the whole thing moves up and down as you walk. The phone camera app’s stabilisation removes this motion nicely. But for e.g. a cockpit video or a ski video this would not be a problem.

Almost a year later I have managed to do a quick test of the DJI Osmo Mobile phone holder.

This video shows the Samsung S7 phone, 1920×1080 60fps 50mbps, with just the phone’s stabilisation (done in software by moving about the sensor area using accelerometer signals) and halfway through this is supplemented by the phone being in the DJI Osmo Mobile stabiliser.
Video was rendered to 25mbps. Vimeo downsamples 1080P material to about 5mbps but you can download the original file from the Vimeo Download function.

In addition to the points above which remain valid, what I found is that this thing (or the original DJI Osmo self contained stabiliser+camera) is pretty clumsy to carry around and use, and you need to be either a gadget-mad person or have a serious use for making good videos. It ought to be possible to chest-mount it but then you better not fall forward when skiing otherwise you will need some surgery

It also takes a fair bit of practice to use it effectively, because it can end up drifting off and pointing in a particular direction – not necessarily forward-looking. It has no way of knowing which way you want it to look, and it cannot sense acceleration-free motion, obviously.

The battery life is poor – 10-20 minutes it seems. However there may be a significant element of self-discharge, since the unit uses a “soft power switch” i.e. it is spring-loaded and you momentarily move it for on/off. If they have done a crap job, it will draw a bit of power while OFF. This is a common issue in most products with a soft switch.

Just an update on the Osmo Mobile battery life comment above: It turns out that the unit has extremely flimsy end stops (cast magnesium, apparently) in the positioning motors and bits of these break off over time and jam the motors. The unit then shuts down. I have sent it off for a warranty repair but if it doesn’t get done under warranty I will bin it and buy one of the other cheaper ones above.

I got the DJI Osmo Pocket, from Drone Doctor UK.

It has good potential for ski videos… for flying it might be a very good option for a homebuilt aircraft where it could be mounted upside down in some kind of high quality glass enclosure, under the wing or under the hull.

This was done previously with a gimbal-stabilised camera but since the previous cameras (e.g. the old DJI Osmo) were much bigger, you needed a huge chunk of glass sticking out.

There is remote control of the camera but it seems to work properly only with a USB-C phone, notwithstanding the availability of micro-USB to USB-C adapters…

A quick and dirty 4K video done with the Osmo Pocket

Vimeo downsamples everything so badly (though not as badly as Youtube) but the stabilisation is impressive.

It would be a lot better in HD (1920×1080).

The colour quality is not as good as the Sony X3000 which I use for flying videos, but the Osmo certainly has potential for some applications. I think it will be ok for ski videos

And here is the HD version. It works slightly better on Vimeo than the 4K one, as well as not needing such a high spec PC

For the sound track, there is an accessory (not sure if currently available) which gives you a 3.5mm mike input.

It does need the pitch control accessory

but it doesn’t exist yet.

It also needs a firmware fix for the yo-yo movement when walking with it. Currently it is completely useless for walking (if the camera is facing forward). I am told this is normal for DJI though. Massive investment in tooling but a lot of stuff doesn’t work on v1.