http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/

It looks like bullsh*t to me. The steady cam must be attached to your body rite?

What do you guys think? Any thoughts?

cheers!

well i have built it and it works very good i love it saved me xxx$$$

It kind of works. There's no gimbal, and despite what the guy says on the site, that's not irrelevant. The same result as his contraption would be achieved by attaching a folded tripod with weights on the bottom and holding the midpoint.

It's so-so for regular use. Where it really rocks is in the inverted mode. That just kicks ass.

It basically adds weight and a handle to something that's relatively awkwardly designed.

I like it. I love inverting it and running around, getting those Evil Dead shots. Is it the same as a real steady cam? No, but I can't complain for the 13.94 I spent to build it.

We built one of these, but it always has this weird shaking motion that was nearly impossible to get rid of, so we modified it a bit and it works pretty well now. I'll post some pictures later but for now here's a paint version.

hello Heliotrope,

Can you post a normal picture of the handle.
The drawning is nice but a picture could help me more.
Thanks mate!

Yeah I'll try and get one up tomorrow.

I built one. It worked pretty well for me. You still have to know how to handle it though, it's now magic or anything.

I've worked with an even poorer-man's version of this that involved a piece of plywood and badly placed handle bars. The camera mount was next to impossible to work with and the plywood base just cut my hands as I ran backwards into a wall at full speed. (Yeah, us filmmakers are pretty tough dudes/dudettes.) But I digress. My point is- don't try to make up your own version, take the time to find all the exact parts and everything.

I've really contributed nothing to this topic, but I'm not deleting everything now.

THERE is newer more versitile version of the $14 steadycam.

Visit the site for complete tutorial & sample video clips.

http://www.STEADYCAM-PRO.com





...

I’ve used this $14 steadicam kit at http://steadycam.org/

Yeah, I also made one of those back in high school. It works pretty well for certain kinds of shots. I couldn't find short pipes, so mine is a bit awkward, but it did the trick on a lot of my earlier videos.

Even if you know how to work it, you definitely won't get shots as smooth as a steadicam, but it's definitely good enough if you really need movement in your film. As people have noted, the inverted mode is the best part.

I still use it occasionally, but right now I'm working on a cheap track dolly. You'd be surprised how much you can accomplish with a static camera (check out Roy Andersson and Michael Haneke films), but I know I love playing with movement. Just make sure camera movement is essential to the tone of your film(s) before you invest the time and money to make it.