Using a simple motion control setup

- What we have here is a small motion control rig and we have it on a small slider. It's pretty easy to set up to create one of these. There they're super small, very compact and easy to travel with but most of the sliders come in different lengths and you can see that we've got our motor here and then we've got our pan tilt head right in the center and everything is connected just with a single cable and everything is running on battery. There are multiple vendors who make different products that are similar to this. What's really great about this, it's very versatile and it allows you to program a move where you start at one position and then over time it will adjust to another position. So if you had an operator working on a small slider manually in your shooting along interview that person would have to stand behind the slider and move back and forth, the entire time for say 30, 40 minutes maybe even an hour, it tiring. So that's where these products come in and it's really easy to set up, can bring in the camera to the first key frame. And I'm going to move the camera, pan it to the correct position and I'm going to adjust the tilt where I like it, set the key frame. Now I'm going to track it down the slider a little bit. Okay, I'm going to pan just the tilt accordingly. That looks like a good shot right there. We set the second key frame. Now I'm going to adjust duration. And in this case, I'm going to go with 25 seconds. Once you use this a couple of times or similar products you'll get a sense of what type of a quickness on the slide you want to have that works for you. So now I'm going to set it to start the move. So the unit is going to move to the first key frame. We're going to start and we're going to set. We're going to get our shot. And you can see subtly starting to move, we have our auto focus on it's tracking her face so I don't have to worry about any of the focus issues with the camera. One of the things that's nice about this particular unit and most sliders that are like it is that it's very quiet. You can tell this unit is very quiet. The motor doesn't make any noise. So it's something that's not going to interfere with audio if you're recording an interview because the room's got to be nice and quiet so we can get good audio and quality sound from the subject. So this is very quiet, it would require you putting a boom microphone super close even here this unit. So it's just going to go back and forth. So looping going back to 0.1 and then once it gets to here it's going to go back and get back to key frame position number two. This is really good on doing product shots where you might want to have a small move around a product. So getting some really nice product shots with really subtle moves that are hard to do manually and by hand that's where these come in. Most commonly, you're going to find these in the interview situation where you're using it as the B camera, the side camera on an interview. You can also use this as an A camera. If you only have one camera for an interview, you can use this as the A camera and just put it right next to the person asking the questions and it can just subtly move back and forth. And again, we have a 42-inch slider right here. You don't have to use the entire length even if you maybe you're just going a foot or so back and forth over a span of 30 seconds, 45, a minute or so just to get that nice subtle move. One thing to keep in mind with motion control rigs like this is that there is usually a weight limit on the type of system that this can use. So in this case we've got a small cinema camera, a photo lens and this particular unit can take somewhere around 10 maybe 12 pounds tops before you start running into issues. So you can't put a giant camera with a giant lens on it, it's just not going to work for something like this. So keep in mind that usually the smaller the camera like a mirrorless or DSLR with a smaller lens is going to work better for a situation like this. Another tip when you're using a motion control is to use auto-focus on your lens. One of the things that you'll note is that because this is completely motorized and everything is independent it's going to be really hard to adjust focus on the fly. So if you have a lens like this one that's got auto focus on it. I would suggest you use it on a lot of modern cameras have face tracking. So if you're shooting an interview, you can simply set the camera to face track and the auto-focus will search for the face and keep it in focus the entire time. Otherwise, if you're in manual focus, you can see that when you're moving back and forth, the camera is pointing at a center object as it does the movement at a central focal point. And so the focus does change and depending on your F-stop and how shallow your depth of field is the focus may shift a little bit. So I recommend using an auto- focus lens which are generally a small lens that fits on a small camera that'll work really well with this type of setup.