Can this Robot replace a Human Camera Assistant?

I don't know about you guys, but I would personally love to have my own little robot that can operate a camera for me, especially when I'm doing these super low-budget indie productions, YouTube videos, where I just don't have the money to be able to hire a camera operator. In this video, I'm going to test out my own setup using different products from Edelkrone and DJI to kind of try to put together my own personal robot assistant that can operate the camera for me. Of course, you can already achieve this using traditional and very expensive motion control systems, and these can easily cost over $100,000. Also, those are huge heavy systems that require a team to transport and set up. I'm trying to achieve this using an affordable and easy setup that one person can do. Edelkrone happens to have a dolly that allows just one person to quickly set up a complicated camera move. This can easily be combined with one of their pan and tilt heads, or if you already own a camera gimbal, then you can use that instead. I will test out both of these and more in this video. So what I have up here right now is actually a pan and tilt setup from Edelkrone. This is the more affordable version, because I am trying to do all of this on a lower budget. I also got their new dolly one, which is sort of like a, again, more affordable version of their dolly that they already had, and I've never used the other one. First time I'm using this one. I watched a couple of videos, so it seems pretty straightforward. Hopefully it works that well in real life. I'm also going to pair this up with a DJI Ronin RS4 Pro gimbal. Now you can put any gimbal really that you have on there, and it should work. Again, fingers crossed. So right now what I'm trying to do is, I want to basically do a sort of a product shot. I've got three cameras up here. Let me just turn on this camera so you can kind of see what I'm seeing. So there. So I have basically three vintage cameras on a table. One, two, three. I'm going to try to get a set of different product shots of it, but obviously I want to do it so it's all automated for me, so I don't have to be actually doing it manually and so that it produces nice, smooth shots. Now the way that this system works is you're going to operate it using a phone. In this case I have an iPhone, and it's pretty straightforward. You launch the app. Once you launch the app, it's going to right away recognize whatever you have, as long as you have the Bluetooth on. So you basically just select what you want to pair it to. I'm going to pair it to my head one, another head one, because I have pan and tilt, and then the dolly one. Let's do pair connect, and see how fast that goes. Okay, looks like it's connected. Well, let's test it out. Let me move away, and let's go, for example, the pan and tilt. Yep, I can move the camera left and right, and up and down. Okay, so that works. And now let's try to do the ... going with the dolly. Going back, okay, forward. This is pretty cool, I got to admit. First time I'm trying a motorized dolly, so ... If you've done this before, it's probably nothing new, but it's always exciting, you know, getting a new piece of gear and testing it out. Oh yeah, I can do circles and stuff. It's supposed to be able to go, like, you know, and all the ... basically back and forth, left and right, in circles. Preferably smooth surface, the wheels are not the biggest, although Edelkron says that you can use it on bumpy surfaces, which I'll try to test out too, and that then you're going to get some micro vibrations, but it's supposedly no problem to get rid of those if you follow their steps on their website for how to get rid of those. First, when you're going to sort of start the app, and you're going to go to the point of interest mode, which is what I want to test out, it's going to tell you basically to kind of level the camera, so make sure that it's balanced, obviously when I put it on there I have to balance it, and that it's ... basically it's facing the right direction, all that stuff. Now the way that this works is in point mode, you basically have three points, sort of points of interest of where the camera is aiming, that you can kind of set up, and then you have positions also that you can set up. So first what I'm going to do is I'm going to maybe just, you know, move the camera back here, kind of, I think I'm too close up there, and actually, by the way, you can move it using this, or you can just literally grab this, because it's going to remember ... essentially the way that the system works is it's all mechanical, so it does not have to connect to your camera, it just remembers exactly the angles mechanically, and even as you're moving the motors, it's going to remember those, so that's sort of how that works. So I'm going to, yeah, position it basically here, and aim it at my first point of interest, there, like that, and I'm going to click point one, press and hold, and it says aim your camera, yeah, I did that, I click next, and then it says slide the camera basically to a different position, and then, you know, basically you just want to be able to show the system, like, two different positions from two different angles, and then it's going to remember where that point of interest is, so in this case I'll move it here, that's pretty good, maybe a little more, okay, there, and I'll click done, and so now essentially it should have remembered that point, so it doesn't matter where I move the dolly, you can see I can move it, and I'm manually right now controlling it, I don't know how smooth it's going to be, but the only thing I find in the app is the joysticks here are a little bit small, so to go really nice and slow, you've got to, like, barely move your finger, but yeah, it is working, as you can see, it's pointing the camera at my first point of interest, my first product, right, so there, and I can also move it there, for example, now, obviously the next cool thing is that I can remember different positions, so let's say, you know, I like this shot more or less, and I want to be able to sort of get kind of a dolly shot, maybe this is too far, somewhere there, start from there, and I'm going to save that as my position A, and then I'm going to go forward, let's say somewhere there, and this is going to be my position B. Now that these, my point is saved and my positioning is saved, I can essentially just, you know, step back and let the system sort of do its work, and I can double tap with two fingers the positions that I wanted to kind of cycle back and forth in between, and it should start going, let's see, yep, it's going, it's going to go to position A, and then see, it's going to start going to position B, and now, in the app, it actually also shows you, like, it basically shows you how far it is, so right now it's saying 10 seconds, 9 seconds, until it reaches that position, so that's how you can kind of know and adjust the speed and all that stuff, and then you see, once it reaches, so it reached that, now it's telling me 21 seconds to reach position 1 again, and it's just going to keep on going, you know, until the battery basically dies, I don't know how long the batteries last, right now I'm using the NPF batteries, you can get a different battery plate that, for example, like the, you know, V-mount or Anton Bauer batteries you can get, anyways, what's next cool thing, let's say you're doing these kind of shots but you have different products you want to show, well, the cool thing is that you can go and remember other points, obviously, so let's say I'm going to move the camera and set up my other points, so look at this camera, go press and hold position, go there, and then I also want to do sort of a similar thing with my other camera here that we're going to do, and I'm going to move the camera again forward, and there, okay, so it's got my things remembered, and let me maybe even move away from here, and sort of let me do another position, so maybe move the dolly a bit further, back, right here, so like, especially when I'm getting that shot of that larger vintage camera, so it's not like so close up, now press and hold that, and now let's say I want to be able to go back and forward between my position A, and then position B, and then position C, which is here, so it's recording there, and I'll just tap those two, and let's see, it should work, it's telling me right now it's going to take 41 seconds, oh, because the distance is longer, to go from this position to the other one there, and you can see, this is how it looks, and now, the cool thing is that in the middle of this, I can, for example, say, oh, I want to look at camera one, so I click point one, and it's going to start basically panning, and it's going to focus, tilt, and aim at that product now, which is pretty cool, I got to admit, to have this, and I don't have to touch the camera, and I could be somewhere remote watching this, or I could be maybe even there, and maybe that's another test I can do, like, for example, if I'm filming myself, a lot of times, I want to be able to have, like, different positions for my camera, like, you know, for my face up here, maybe for the products that I'm reviewing when I'm doing these YouTube videos, and then, for example, maybe even doing, like, a podcast, like, imagine if you had a podcast with three guests, well, you can set it up so that the camera remembers the position of the three guests, you can set your different position of the dolly, and then, you just go in there, and you could be participating in the video, while this, basically, system just works, and you see, now, if I'm going to click point two, it's going there, so it's going to my other camera there, and it's going to stay centered on that camera, okay, anyways, I'm going to stop this, so now, maybe, I'm going to do, like I was saying, kind of a fake podcast set up, this is going to be my guest on my podcast, let's see, he's, well, actually, this is a good test, because he's much shorter, so the camera will have to remember his position, and my position, obviously, here, here I am, interviewing our favorite guest, Teddy, and the camera, right now, as you can see, is focused on me, hopefully, with this lens, it looks better, the framing, and like you can see, I can switch quickly to position or point two, so now, it's looking at Teddy, could have a guest, could have another guest, another point of interest I can add, and for example, now, I'll switch to me, and I can, obviously, look at the camera, but let's say, if I'm busy, I'm talking to the, you know, our guest here, well, I can see in the app, if it's already reached that position, and now, again, the same thing, for example, I just tapped it, so it switches to Teddy, now, I know, now, it's positioned, and aiming at Teddy, I'm gonna switch back, and definitely a cool setup, like to be able to have, again, the robot, you know, move the camera for you, and change the framing, and it also keeps that point, you know, on track, doesn't matter where the dolly is, in the app, there are a lot more options, for example, you can choose different types of paths, such as a straight line, an arc, or even a smooth curves path, here I set up a shot, where the dolly moves in, and out, while always pointing the camera at our subject, I can also adjust the speed, and the dampening of the camera, I also did a curves path, where the dolly goes indefinitely around, in a perfect circle, while the camera is pointing at the subject in the middle, I even did this little scene, using just a dolly, now, without the pan and tilt head, I was still able to set up some really nice and interesting shots, and I did all of this, just by manually moving the dolly with my hands, and then quickly adding the different positions in the app, you can also do time lapse shots, with this dolly, or a hyperlapse, as you can see in these examples from Edelkrone, the setup process is similarly fast, and easy to do, perhaps the thing I love the most about this dolly, is that it folds up fast, and packs real small, this means I will actually want to take this with me to more jobs, even when I don't have a crew to rely on, for carrying and setting up the equipment, so now, I essentially just put the camera on the gimbal, and it's again, on the dolly 1, so I'm gonna sit here, but let me connect to the dolly 1, now, right now, in my app, it's only showing me dolly 1, because the pan and tilt head are not connected, so I connect there, and now, because of that, I have poses 1 to 6, because I can just remember more poses, so here, I'll be doing, I don't know, a fake review of these vintage cameras, which by the way, these are really cool, because I love these things, I love collecting them, like when I go to, you know, like pawn shops, and places like that, but anyways, yeah, let me move the dolly here, okay, so this will be 1 position, and right now, I don't like my framing there, so that's the cool thing about the DJI RS4, I can quickly reframe like this, and then, I'm gonna switch, so basically, this will be position 1, and now, I'm gonna move it back, so it goes to another position, and I'm just gonna do 2 positions, but again, you get the point, you can do 6 positions here, okay, there, and you can see, like right now, because I'm manually operating it, when I basically just let go of it, it just suddenly stops, and because of that, like I have a small, lighter tripod, so it's not very sturdy, so because of that, the whole thing just shakes, but anyways, yeah, now, I've got these 2, I can adjust my speed, my ease in and ease out, but once I'm ready, I just double tap the 2 poses, and now, I can put my phone away, because it's just gonna be essentially going back and forth between these 2 poses, like basically the 2 positions of the dolly, but the DJI Ronin is doing all the, basically following me, so whether I'm here talking about, you know, these cool vintage cameras, or maybe, I don't know, I go over here to my teddy bear friend, so you can see, it's following me, I can sit down, even if I decide, like, okay, you know what, I wanna move around, I'm gonna go here, I don't know, I'm showing you guys, oh, this is my studio, which I, by the way, I don't know if you noticed, but a lot of things have changed in my studio, so yeah, so this is my studio, this is kind of how it looks, and as you can see, I can kind of walk around, and I can get different kind of shots here, just using this, so, pretty cool setup, and definitely helpful if you wanna add some dynamic camera moves into these videos, but again, you don't have anybody operating the camera for you. Just before I was about to release this video, I was notified of an update on the Edelkrone app that now allows you to create an entire chain of poses. Before you could only loop in between 2 points at a time. Now you can set up a chain of 6 dolly poses and 6 points of interest for the pen and tilt to follow. You can even adjust the speed of each pose independently. So essentially, you can now create a lot more complicated camera moves, but I will get into that as I further test out the system and its updated app in my follow-up video. Now, something to keep in mind is that the footage you will get out of this setup will sometimes require post-stabilization. Edelkrone even states that on their website and they provide instructions on how to do it. What I showed so far has been stabilized in some cases. Here is how some of the shots look straight out of the camera. Now I noticed that this really only happened when using the Edelkrone pen and tilt head. When I used the DJI Ronin gimbal on top of the dolly, the shots were perfectly smooth. Either way, this combo of the dolly and the gimbal opens up a lot of new possibilities. If you want to see what else you can do with the RS4 gimbal, then check out my other video where I test it out with the DJI Focus Pro. This is the next thing I'm going to be adding to my whole robotic camera assistant setup. That's it for this one. Bye!