Has anyone dealt with CineCity and their version of the Glidecam?

[Jim Fields]

While the idea of building one from books and instructions from HBS, I just want to buy one, without paying 10K for it.

I have a JVC HD110U, with extra gear, what do you recommend?

[Terry Thompson]

Jim,

What kind of extras? How much extra weight?

Tery
Indicam

[Charles King]

Originally Posted by Jim Fields

While the idea of building one from books and instructions from HBS, I just want to buy one, without paying 10K for it.

I have a JVC HD110U, with extra gear, what do you recommend?

Do not worry Jim, it wasn't a sales pitch. I did not say you should build one. The idea of the venture group is to have someone else build the parts for you as a group for less. Someone asked about the parts and that's why I answered. Do not worry, I do not recommend anyone to build one, but rather buy a commercial system. In fact I've never sale pitched HBS to anyone. That's not my game. If someone is interested they just go there.

You've made a good decision though. Building or putting one together is not for everyone. Check out what Terry has to offer.

[Terry Thompson]

By the way Charles, we just did a modification to allow us to move forward with the double upgraded arm. It took a while but it should work.

All we need to find now is a machinest who is hungry. Our current one likes to take his sweet time.

Thanks for your sense of humor!

Tery (or Terry)
Indicam

[Charles King]

Originally Posted by Terry Thompson

By the way Charles, we just did a modification to allow up to move forward with the double upgraded arm. It took a while but it should work.

All we need to find now is a machinest who is hungry. Our current one likes to take his sweet time.

Thanks for your sense of humor!

Tery (or Terry)
Indicam

I'll be looking forward to that upgrade Terry. I guess one needs a little humor in this day and age :)

[Jim Fields]

I need to make this fast as I am heading out the door, I am filming Godsmack tonight in Dallas and I have a full day of shooting to look forward to.

I have a light which I use during Receptions/dark clubs.
Anton Bauer batteries 2 of them plus the charger stay on the camera
format brand matte box
and wireless gear stay on the camera at all times. I have no idea what the weight is, but I am sure it is up towards 20-30lbs I would think.


what do you have in mind Terry?

I want to upgrade to a screen, and a T-Bracket for holding 2 batteries on the camera, plus maybe an led light here soon.

[Terry Thompson]

Jim,l

That's some serious equipment. I'm a feared that even the Flyer won't be able to handle that much weight as it says it can handle cameras up to 15 pounds. You might want to weigh everything you will be flying so we can suggest rigs that are in the running.

THE GLIDECAM V-25 can handle cameras up to 25 pounds but alas it is close to the $10k mark. Maybe a used support system...?

I agree with the move to LED lights as even when they are dimmed the color temperature stays the same. They also go a long time on a set of batteries compared to regular lights.

Tery
Indicam

[Tom Wills]

You most certainly don't need all that kit on a Steadicam. Take it down to the lights, the wireless, and the matte box. A good rig for that caliber of camera should have 12v power through the post, so one set of batteries down below will cover you. The screen on the bottom of the sled will work fine, so don't figure that or its mounting into the equation, and the LED lights should if anything reduce weight. The wireless shouldn't weigh too much, and the Matte Box should be relatively lightweight, and the light really should be quite light too, so that should considerably lighten your rig. According to JVC's specs, the camera itself only weighs 7 pounds, so that plus maybe 4 or 5 pounds in accessories should be good for a Flyer. Is there a reason why you say 2 batteries and the charger (I'm assuming the Titan charger/power unit) stays on the camera?

[Chris Bottrell]

Just a quick one to say i have dealt with this company, and i must say their products are of a good quality, i bought the jumbo matte box with rods for my XL2 and it is amazing for the $390 i payed for it. People should give these guys a break they are not con men or women they are just trying to make a living the same as us all.

[Jon Pall Eyjolfsson]

Hi I bought from them a mattebox and rod support. Good price good delivery time. And the Matte box is working fine and fine build... sorry to hear about the glide cam thing

JP

[Kenny Shem]

Looking at various threads, its seems that many people have got their system from them and have good feedbacks on the quality. I do not think they are con-men, but rather they copy the basic infrastructure of those stabilizer system and make minor changes to avoid infringing patent laws and sell them to budget videographer who simply can't afford Steadicam or Glidecam rigs.
The material in making those system are cheap anyway (just simple metal), even for Steadicam brand. Just that you are paying a premium for the name "Steadicam" and their slightly better built products.

[Charles Papert]

Originally Posted by Kenny Shem

The material in making those system are cheap anyway (just simple metal), even for Steadicam brand. Just that you are paying a premium for the name "Steadicam" and their slightly better built products.

It's not about the materials, it's about the design. There is a fascinating misconception in the indie filmmaking world that because something seems to be possible to copy in a local machine shop, that it should be priced at around the cost of the components. For any given product, the manufacturer has spent a tremendous amount of time, energy, resources and money developing the goods, tooling up, distributing, advertising, providing customer support etc.

It might be surprising for people to know that the Steadicam brand is actually NOT the most widely used stabilizer in feature film and episodic television production emanating from Hollywood, and has not been for more than 10 years. There are a few other manufacturers who came up with their own variations on the design that were embraced in the light of the Steadicam manufacturer's refusal to upgrade their product at the time; these other rigs cost the same amount and do not boast the Steadicam brand but are excellent pieces of gear. After owning several used Steadicams I was able to move to one of these systems about 10 years ago myself; my current rig is made up of components from 5 different manufacturers that I have opted to "mix and match" thanks to their intelligent compatibility.

Having clarified that I am not a blinkered follower of the Steadicam brand, in the DV world, the Steadicam brand is far from token and their products are significantly beyond "slightly better built". The performance and design features of the Merlin, Pilot and Flyer are well beyond ANY of their competition. The Pilot and Flyer arms are in a league of their own, performing with the same precision and feel of the $20K full-size arms.

Just because there are anecdotes on the web about happy customers for any given rig doesn't mean that these rigs are equal, or close to it. I have yet to hear of anyone who owns a "no-name" stabilizer and has spent enough time in it to really get the skill down slip on a Steadicam rig and not immediately recognize the difference in performance, adjustability, accuracy etc.

Whether the difference in price tag is justifiable is a choice that is virtually always made by one's personal finances. If one's standards are up to a certain level, then one must have the gear that fits those standards. A Stradivarius would be wasted on a first-year violin student who may not appreciate what makes it so great (and thus considers it to be great in name only), but a first-rate concert violinist will appreciate the difference and may settle for nothing less.

[Charles King]

That's it CP! I have crown you my personal Idol and GOD!!!! :) Beyond your steadicam wizardry I admire your openness and level-headiness. Thank you for being down right honest and absolutely obsolete, to big headiness. There should be more of you. :)

[Terry Thompson]

I just found two cents so I'll throw it in here.

Charles P. has it correct (as usual).

The almost exact copies of the Glidecam sled and other equipment shows that someone from another country can take a good rig, copy all the parts, assemble it, and sell it for a lot less. This is because they don't have any design time, trial and error, many prototypes, frustration, anger, jubilation, (on and on), into the system. It's a lot of design (R&D) that goes into the price of a rig as it should be. After all, the cost of the elements in a human body don't amount to very much but our designer made everything work together so that we are priceless. It's not as much as what we are made of as it is what we can accomplish.

OK, back to the subject at hand. Our problem isn't with someone who uses a rig (like the Glidecam for an example) and makes something similar but still different with improvements and style changes. The problem we see with the Flycam etc. is that they look like exact copies. I'm sure Glidecam isn't happy about it and we (as stabilizer manufactures) aren't either. We know how much work goes into the design and engineering aspects of a good stabilizer and manufacturers should receive the fruits of their labors. Also, just because it looks the same doesn't mean it works the same.

There are a lot of stabilizers in the market today. There are many different design changes or adaptations which are available. There are also a great variety of prices. Buy one from someone who didn't just copy someone else.

We all owe thanks to the original Steadicam designer, Garret Brown, and we manufactures know to whom we are indebted.

We are also very grateful to all of you guys (and girls) on all of the various forums for your selfless help and time. Hail to the Charles' and all the rest!

Are my two cents up yet?

Tery
Indicam

[Charles Papert]

Thanks CK and Terry, and I will add to my words that there is nothing inherently wrong with being satisfied with a lower-cost rig, or even manufacturing a lower cost rig. I've seen some design elements on some of these that frankly baffle me as they could have been made to work a lot better for the same price (just design choices that are somewhat arbitrary). For instance, years ago I met with the designer of the Magiqcam to discuss an early version of the rig. He had set up his gimbal to arm connection the opposite way of any other rig I had seen, in that the armpost section was a permanent part of the gimbal handle which then fed into receiver holes at the end of the arm. I had suggested to him that variable armposts were a great way to deliver flexibility in lens height, but his design was making it much more complicated to accomplish this, plus it was harder to mount the post into the arm (the arc of the gimbal with post attached was unwieldy). I asked him why he had made it this way and the reason he gave was that it was just different, so it wouldn't resemble the Glidecam in this aspect. The problem was that it didn't work as well as the tried-and-true in theory or practice. And thus the rig suffered for it.

Another example is the FS-Pro rig that I tested a few weeks back; discovering that the gimbal handle had been milled square rather than round was a complete head-scratcher, as it was instantly apparent that it was less comfortable to the operator. In the course of operating, one's hand often migrates in position around the diameter of the gimbal handle and in the case of a rig that lacks a 2-way leveling system for the arm-vest connection, many operators will have find themselves gripping the handle extra tightly to reign in the rig. It's easy to see why a square stock handle, even with rounded edges, is not ideal.

So what to learn from this? There are certain design elements of the body-mounted stabilizer that have been field-tested for 30 years now and while there may still be new ways to skin the cat (the back-mounted vest is a relatively late arrival that is a good example of this), it's only worth implementing change if it is beneficial to the user. At the same time, there is the argument laid out here against making a simple knock-off, i.e. rip-off.

My feeling is that at this stage of the game, we are pretty far down the road with the original Steadicam design. There's not a whole lot of cosmetic difference between a gimbal circa 1976 and today, whether wearing the Steadicam brand or a 3rd party design (however the use of ball bearings and linear axis convergence were welcome developments along the way). So in some ways it's not surprising that many rigs appear so similar. I have no doubt that once the Pilot is well-established, the flat-bottomed sled that first appeared on the Glidecams years ago and have been oft imitated will slowly turn into Pilot-like telescoping or migrating tubular systems with weights around the circumference. The "big secret" that we have long known in the full-size rig world is that expanding the components of the rig adds exponential amounts of inertia and stability that is so sorely lacking in lightweight sleds, without adding more weight if desired--the Pilot's ability to spread out the counterweight more than previous rig's is a major reason why it feels so solid to operate.

Anyway, outside of that--I've said this before and I will say it again--if someone has an absolute maximum budget and can only afford a particular stabilizer and they are perfectly satisfied with its performance, then I wish them happy flying and all the best. I do get frustated reading about difficulties with customer service especially with the overseas/eBay brands, as well as badly manufacturered gear that falls apart easily, or incomplete documentation accompanying the rigs. Mostly I hate to see people get frustrated with a stabilizer purchase and be unable to get the results they want, because after all this is supposed to be fun--isn't it??!