Camera vehicles

[mahjqa]

So, when I posted my

, plenty of people were actually more interested in the camera vehicles than the car itself. So, here's some details on them.

This post deals mostly with the vehicle that travels in a straight line. In the making of, it shows up

. This one:

Very few people make camera vehicles to show off their builds, even though they can add some great visuals to a video. I'll try and nail down what makes them work for me.

Very important: Keep your camera close to the ground. Really close. Nope, closer than that. And point it upwards a bit.

Why do you want it that way? Well, most videos are filmed like this:

Which shows the subject all right, but since we're looking down on it, our brain tells us immediately: "that is one tiny car, dude".

Better is to have the camera at the same height as the subject itself.

This is kind of OK. We're used to looking at cars like that, and our brain is slightly more convinced we're dealing with an actual car here.

However, the lower you get your lens...

Now we're talking. This is one massive vehicle. (I'm not going to argue that this picture looks prettier than the birds eye view. I'm saying it's more effective.)

So, how do you get that camera angled upward? And how do you secure it nicely? Most cameras don't have dimensions that exactly match Lego parts...

That's why you use tires. Lots of tires. Chances are, you already have tons of those tiny little tires sitting at home, and you never use them. Get them.

Because they come in all sorts of sizes, you can easily adjust them to fit the shape of your camera. And since rubber has a little give, you can actually clamp your camera in tightly, so the camera won't shake.

Anyway. More pictures are at my flickr thingie: Linear camera vehicle.

I'll try to update this thread with more info when I have the time.

Some short things:

-The suspension. I've added springs to my camera vehicles, hoping it would smooth out the bumps. Will it fix everything? Nope. Still, I'm convinced that it helps.

-My camera vehicles have NO STEERING of any kind. This one just goes forwards and backwards. To get into view, you actually have to steer your vehicle alongside it. To make it easier, I've used rechargeable batteries, so I can finetune the speed of the camera vehicle to match the car a little. (Usually, the camera vehicle should go slightly slower than the thing you're trying to film). To adjust the speed, you could also use a speed remote control. This has the advantage that there's an easy red "stop" button, and you don't have to run after your camera vehicle to turn it off again.

For this version, I've made the propulsion unit separate:

This way, I don't have to add suspension to driven wheels. The grey steering arms that stick out can move up and down a little, so any shocks of the propulsion unit don't really affect the camera.

Anyway. Questions?

Edited May 14, 2015 by mahjqa

[rm8]

Thank you. I should try something like that:)

Did you try larger ZR tires for camera car? Could, for example, 81 mm (42000) tires run smoother than these 30 mm small ones? As I understand they should jump/raise smoother than small radius wheels..

Edited May 14, 2015 by rm8

[Tommy Styrvoky]

Now I'm tempted to make a camera vehicle...

[OzShan]

Really cool write up, thanks.

[DrJB]

Really neat. Is this the same vehicle you used for the metal grudge?

[dhc6twinotter]

Great topic! I build a camera vehicle to film my Super Cub, and they are great for interesting shots. The one I built was no where near as nice as this one though.

[veryrusty]

Thanks for sharing. So much of Lego is building things which are real and complicated in real life without having specialised tools and it's cool to see the same for camera equipment.

Theres so much professional quality work being done for something that is a very easy to enter pastime.

[BusterHaus]

Do you think the shock absorbers help with the image stability? Most cameras have digital or optical image stabilization built in, and from what I understand it reacts very fast to small shakes and bumps.

Either way you made a sweet setup for filming. The writeup is full of good tips, too.

Edited May 15, 2015 by BusterHaus

[mahjqa]

Rm8, Tommy Styrvoky; I think both your models would be very well suited.

Did you try larger ZR tires for camera car? Could, for example, 81 mm (42000) tires run smoother than these 30 mm small ones? As I understand they should jump/raise smoother than small radius wheels..

They would propably be a bit smoother, but so far I've found them to be a bit hard to integrate in such a way that they don't obscure the view of the camera. Luckily, the small ones do the job.

Really neat. Is this the same vehicle you used for the metal grudge?

That would be this one:

They share some similarities, as it's an earlier version. I constantly try to adapt and improve my camera vehicles.

Great topic! I build a camera vehicle to film my Super Cub, and they are great for interesting shots. The one I built was no where near as nice as this one though.

You've got me interested! Any chance of a picture of yours?

Thanks for sharing. So much of Lego is building things which are real and complicated in real life without having specialised tools and it's cool to see the same for camera equipment.

Theres so much professional quality work being done for something that is a very easy to enter pastime.

Thank you

Do you think the shock absorbers help with the image stability? Most cameras have digital or optical image stabilization built in, and from what I understand it reacts very fast to small shakes and bumps.

It's hard to get real, solid data. However, the general impression I get is that they do work. And you're right that there are many ways to stabilize footage, either in camera or in postproduction, but I've found that the better the footage you start with, the better the end result will be.

Either way you made a sweet setup for filming. The writeup is full of good tops, too.

Again, thanks

[Lipko]

Using the built-in image stabilization can have some funky and pretty bad effects. Usually the bright/focused object (probably the model) tends to be fixed to the view to a pretty big extent, meaning the model won't shake or even move for a while, but the whole background will. Even if the camera is fixed and you want the model to actually move on the image . The view will try to follow the model. The stabilizer even scales the view so that the bright/focused patch it detects don't change size. And that's awkward with a model that does change it size rapidly.

One of my videos have this unwanted effect, I simply forgot to turn the camera's feature off, and it wasn't my camera, so couldn't record the scene again.

Youtube's image stabilization behaves very similarly.

Edited May 15, 2015 by Lipko

[Technic Jim]

@mahjqa Sorry to give this topic a bit of a nudge but the camera I use for filming my lego isn't very good and I'm thinking of an upgrade so, out of interest, what camera do you use? I thought that a little compact camera like this one would be really good because I don't want to spend tons of money on a huge camera and this looks fairly small (and hopefully cheap). Cheers