Video GOLD!!! INSANE Camera Motion Control For Food Videos - Edelkrone SliderPlus AND HeadPlus

Hey, what's up guys? How's it going? Today in the studio I got a really, really cool piece of gear I want to show you. Now when I got my Fujifilm X-T3 there, I told you guys that this was the first big piece in a larger video kit that I wanted to build. Well, today in the studio I got another really, really big piece to that kit and that's the Edelkrone slider head plus focus module bundle thingamabob. It's massive, but it is really, really cool and I'm super excited about it. How you hanging in there, Bob? Just bobbing along. Wow, that's a lot of black boxes. What I love about Edelkrone is just how modular they make everything. If you want to use just the slider, you can. And if you want your slider motorized, you can do that too. If you just want to use the head plus, you can do that or bundle it all together into one crazy monster video making setup. You got your slider and your slide module, you got your focus module, your laser beam and your head plus to give you that pan and tilt action while it's sliding back and forth on the rails. And what's really great about it is it all connects via Bluetooth to an app on your phone. Using all of this to capture some smooth action here inside the studio is just going to be awesome. It's going to full on change the way that I make videos. Now, to start off with, we have the slider plus pro. This is the long version. They do make a smaller one and it's just like any other slider at first glance. It has these really cool feet that are integrated into the sides of the slider here and you can just twist those down and then you're set. You can place your tripod head on top of the slider. Any tripod head would do. It has a three quarter inch screw there. I'm just going to use this flex tilt head that I got from Edelkrone from a previous video. It's a pretty cool head and then once you got that on, you can do your pushes and your pulls and your side to side action. It's really smooth and you get 23 inches of travel here. And at this point, it's like any other really well engineered slider, but, and there's a big but, when you put this slider on a tripod, that's when the awesomeness gets turned up to 11. It has this little wheel down here which you can spin to secure it to your tripod. That way you don't have to spin the whole slider and set up kind of awkwardly on set. But once it's secured, then your 23 inches of travel gets doubled, which I have to say when I first saw, it blew my mind. I mean, how smart of a design is that? Now something that I really appreciate with Edelkrone is the level of detail and engineering that literally goes into creating every one of their products. From giving us extra distance on the slider like that, I mean how cool is that? It sets them apart. To the small things like shipping these little cool allen key sets, which it seems that you can deconstruct, take apart, or adjust pretty much everything that they sell with just two allen keys. And they put them in every box. I have a ton of these lying around now. And even these are cool and they come in their own little magnetic case. The slider comes with two different types of belts. A fabric one and one that has teeth to use with the slide module. Now they're both magnetic and they just clip on like this. Then you can connect the slide module. It has this little gear here for the belt. You can just screw it into the end of the slider and power it with some LPE6 batteries or you can simply just run some DC power to the bottom of the slide module. Now once it's powered on, it'll beep. You can connect it via Bluetooth to your phone and start sliding away. Pretty cool. And then you can easily save positions in your phone. I could move this over with my hand real quickly, hold down on that first square in the app to save that position, and then I could move the camera just a little bit to show you guys and I could save that position as well. Then I could tap on that first square and it'll return back to the same exact spot. Or I could tap on both of those squares at the same time and the camera will continuously move back and forth between those two saved positions. This would be really great for some kind of interview style shot. To get that second and third dimension of the pan and tilt, I'm going to screw the Head Plus onto our slider here. Now there's two different versions of this head. This one is the 10-pound carrying capacity. There's a Head Plus Pro, which carries up to 20 pounds for those massive red type camera setups, but everything else with the two heads are exactly the same. On the back you have ports for the laser and the follow focus, a jack to control the camera, and one for time lapses. You need to balance your camera on this little arm before you place it on the head. That way you're not overworking your motors, but to do this, it's really, really simple. You just take this little knob that they provide, it's magnetic, it fits in the front there, and you place it where it would connect to the head, and then you tighten that down. Once you have it tightened down, you can tip your camera up and rest it on that little knob. Now if it's perfectly balanced, it should just sit there like this and not fall over, but you may need to slide your camera up or down or push it forward or backwards to get it to rest perfectly on that knob. Now once you're finished, you just tip it back over, take that knob out, secure it back into its little magnetic slot there, and you're ready to go. And once it's balanced, just whip it onto the head plus here, tighten that down, plug it into the DC power or throw some batteries on, and you're all set for some great pan and tilt action or all three at the same time. But this setup is not complete without these two little guys, the focus module and the laser module. The laser just snaps on magnetically at the bottom here once you install the plate that comes with it, and the focus module slides in over here and rests against your lens gears. Yes, lens gears. Now you need cine lenses to work with the focus module, or Edelkrone supplies an adapter like this little gear ring that you can put onto your standard lenses like this 100mm right here. But I didn't really like this adapter because it has this little knobby here, and the problem that I had is this knob kept running into the focus module gear ring right here because each lens needs to be calibrated to the focus module. Now there's a great tutorial on how to do that supplied by Edelkrone, actually Edelkrone has a bunch of great tutorials on this entire setup. But basically a quick breakdown is that when you go to calibrate your lens, it's trying to find the infinity mark and it's trying to find the macro mark. And because standard lenses don't have really hard stops on your focus ring, it just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning. This kept running into the focus module and that became quite annoying. So to make a long story short, I bought these sweet gear rings from followfocusgears.com. They slide right over your lens, really snug onto your focal ring. I got one for my 100mm, my 50mm and my 24mm and there's no more knobby-dealy to get in the way. Then slip the lens onto the camera, tighten down the focus module, grab my phone here, grab the app, turn it on, bundle all of these together, then I could slide this over here, focus on that, save that position, slide it back over here, focus on my subject, save that position and let it go. I'm creating two slider shots here. One of me pouring these walnuts into the cup and the other one's going to be of me spreading out the walnuts onto the pan. Now I'm going to do this so I can be in two places at once, like you've kind of seen in a couple of previous clips in this video. And what's really awesome is because the Edelchrome can move side to side in the exact same position because I have both positions saved onto the app, I can easily blend these two clips later on in post-production. The sequencer setup. You can have the app save up to six positions and then you can control the transitions between each one of those positions. So basically I could pick up this apple, have the camera pull back and then focus on me slicing the apple over here on the cutting board and then pan over as I place a slice on that side of the table, all in one motion. That was a long process for a salad. There's just so much stuff going on here. Let me just give you a quick overview. I got my green leafy bits. I don't know. Some of you might know what those are. I don't have a lot of experience with them. I got my candied cayenne spicy walnuts. Those are delicious on their own. I got my bacon bits, my feta cheese, my cranberries, apples, onions and Dijon red wine vinaigrette to make one first class salad. I'm really excited. I can't wait to dive into it and take the photo. But this video was a blast to make with that Edelchrome slider system. I mean, it was really amazing. Those pan and tilts, the side to side actions, just so many different options for creative shots, a lot of which I would never be able to do without that system. That shot of me dumping the walnuts into the pan as the camera was pulling back and rack focusing at the same time, that's a shot that I would never be able to make on my own. I'm here filming myself 99% of the time and I can't be in two places at once except with some creative editing. But speaking about editing, I just can't wait to get all these clips back into the computer. But for now, let's finish styling this salad and make this final shot. One of the crazier aspects about this setup is the automatic target tracking. I haven't had a lot of time to play around with it, but basically it uses the laser module to pinpoint a spot in your frame. And then as the slider moves, it'll keep that exact same spot in focus and the same composition so you get this really cool parallax effect. It's a little hard to see, but the laser beam is right there at the edge of my cup. Then once my target is acquired, I just press done and the camera will automatically move to compose the shot. I haven't tested them out yet, but Edelkrone says that you can have up to three targets and then switch between them live as the slider is moving. All right, so I'm going to take the Edelkrone slider up into the mountains and try to film some of the amazing fall colors that we have right now in Southern California. So the Jeep is packed and we're ready to go. Now this is camping. This happened. First off, I'm way, way out in the middle of nowhere. It's pretty well good and stuck. That tire is spinning freely. That tire is not going anywhere. That is almost completely buried. And I don't have a winch. I'm out here all by myself. I've piled rocks. I've dug out. I've tried everything. And last resort, I really didn't want to do it, I've called a off-road recovery service and they come out here when idiots like me come way, way out in the middle of nowhere and get their Jeep stuck in the mud. I'm at 10,500 feet, so the altitude is kind of taking my breath away, but I've been here for about two hours now waiting on the recovery since I made the phone call. And luckily, I'm telling you, I couldn't have been luckier where I got stuck because this entire week on this entire mountain, I have not had cell service whatsoever. But right here where I got stuck, I have two bars and was able to make the phone call so I can wholeheartedly recommend this place to get stuck. If you're going to get stuck, get stuck here. You'll be able to get yourself out. But there's nothing else that I can do but sit back and relax, drink my coffee and enjoy the view. It's a beautiful view. All right, well, I made it back into the studio and off of that mountain in one piece. Recovery came way late into the night, so I wasn't able to film it, but it was really a fun adventure and it was really great to be able to take all that Edelkrone gear out with me to film that epic, beautiful scenery, those fall colors, the waterfalls, the mountains, all that really great stuff and be so far away from civilization and still be able to make all of those really cool camera movements and the pans and the tilts and all that good stuff just using camera batteries, which I was going to take with me anyways. The only downside I'd have to say is that it is quite heavy and bulky to be hiking around with, but I don't really see how Edelkrone could really make it any smaller than they already have and still have it be able to do what it does, so it just highlights the fact that I need a really large backpack to carry it all in, which I think they just came out with one. I'll have to go check out their website. Speaking about their website, you guys need to go check it out right now. The link is in the description below. They're doing a huge Halloween giveaway where you can get yourself all of this gear that I showed you today, the slider, the head plus, the focus module, the laser module, and all the batteries to run it all, and all you got to do is sign up between now and November 1st, so go to the website, check it out, and get yourself some really sweet gear. I have to give a huge shout out to Edelkrone because they're sponsoring my workshop, which is happening in Salt Lake City December 4th through the 7th. It's going to be a really, really fun time. Two days of photography and two days of video, and I got a huge box filled with Edelkrone gear that I can't wait for all of you guys to test out with, play with, and just make some really cool videos with, so go sign up to that. The link is in the description below. There's still spots available, and it's going to be a really great time. I can't wait to see you all there, but hey, if you're new to this channel, please hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications, consider giving it some thumbs up. If you like this video, drop some comments down below. You can tell me how much of a bad driver I am or how my Jeep needs a winch and all that good stuff, but that is it for this video, and I'll see you in the next one.