It’s been well over 2 years since I first purchased the Glidecam 4000 and began this obsession with camera stabilization. This journey (which I’m still on) has been one of DIY obsession. Fueled by my refusal to spend the money to get a real Steadicam, I have instead sunk hundreds into places like eBay, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Ace’s Hardware, and Musician’s Friend. Am I satisfied totally with the results? Never – but I have brought my modified Glidecam to a reasonably strong level of stability. Will I always be tinkering with it? Probably – or at least until I have enough money that I can justify the purchase of a Steadicam… but that’s a long ways off.

Until then, the world will have to bear with me and the “Franken-Glidecam”

It all started with this very non-assuming piece of equipment:

The Glidecam 4000 Pro

Not much to it – it’s a post with a gimbal attached. The top is comprised of a two of metal plates held together by thumbscrews which you can slide along two axises and big metal washers are used as counter weights. The gimbal is actually the best thing about the Glidecam 4000 – it’s very smooth.

The first thing that had to be added was a quick release plate. On the glidecam, the camera is attached to the top sliding plate which is held to lower plate by 4 thumbscrews. This is certainly not ideal when you want to switch from the glidecam to tripod and back again regularly.

I mounted a small rectangular piece of whiteboard (painted black) to the Glidecam’s top sliding plate using wood screws – making sure that I placed the wood piece as squarely in the middle as I could (any weight that is offset will cause issues to the overall balance). To this piece of wood I mounted a Manfrotto 357 Pro Quick Release Adapter using 4 wood screws

I tested out my Glidecam by offering up my services at a charity jazz festival here in Temecula. The first thing I realized was that this sucker was HEAVY!!! If I was going to be doing some real shots with this setup I needed some help in the form of an arm.

I bought the Glidecam Body pod – that was a total waste of money and time. First of all I couldn’t get the straps to around my body the way they show you in the picture – secondly, it doesn’t do anything…

What I needed was an articulated iso-arm… so I began shopping around. The cheapest produced arm I could find was around $1000 and that was still more than I was willing to spend. And I don’t know much about metal working so I didn’t want to build my own.

Then I found a couple of kids selling this articulated arm on Ebay for $350. Not too bad. It looked like a homemade machined arm – but it was better than I could do so I bought it.

Unfortunately, the arm didn’t come with springs or a vest – and the kids that made it weren’t exactly the most professional businessmen in the world. No big deal – I got what I needed, and articulated arm that was attached to a post.

I sewed the arms of an old backpack to the post… voila – I had an iso-arm that hooked up to the back. I added some springs from the hardware store and I was off and running.

Here’s one of my favorite photos – again, volunteering time at a charity golf event to get more experience with the glidecam:

You can see the straps of the backpack and the arm which is on my right side.

For about a year I was content with with this setup – I accepted it’s particularities including the fact that as you wore it, it would constantly ride up your back. The way the arm was positioned, the handle would occasionally bump the bottom of the camera plate and send the contraption in a jerky swing.

But then I started getting some calls to use this thing. And although the clients were happy with the end result, I knew I could do more to not only get better shots but also more comfortable use.

At the NAB of 2008, I put on the Steadicam Flyer which they had equipped with my Sony Ex1 camera. What a difference – Comfortable vest, good movement, smooth arm… At $6000 for the rig, I knew I couldn’t afford it right away, but I could make due with my glidecam – with alterations.

The first thing that had to be done was to more the arm from the back to the front. To accomplish this I ordered the cheapest Marching Drum Harness I could find on Musician’s Friend.

If it was good enough for the drummers to be lugging around 30 lbs, it ought to work for me. Attaching the iso arm to this drum carrier was very straight forward, a couple of long bolts and I had it all hooked up. I added an additional strap around the waist and I found that wearing a back brace when operating took out a lot of the lower back strain.

Immediately I solved the two problems I had had with the previous setup (with the arm attaching to the back). No longer was contraption sliding down (because now it was in the front) and the combined strength of the springs kept the handle from banging the bottom plate.


The other thing that I noticed with the Steadicam set up was the placement of a monitor on the bottom of the rig. I had been content using the flip out LCD of the camera but this was most certainly creating balance issues- even the slight added weight of a flip out LCD to one side was enough to cause some strange rotations. I had to mount a monitor.

I had purchased a Varizoom Monitor for use with the RedRock Micro Adapter (to flip the image right side up) but I was never happy with it’s resolution. Fortunately this was perfect for this particular application. I took a piece of steel plate, cut it to length and attached it with nuts and bolts to the bottom of the glidecam.

Using gaffer’s tape, I taped the battery for the monitor and the RCA cable to camera. It was pretty but it worked.

Then one day, on a whim, I decided to through the entire Redrock system on my set up. To offset the weight, I used a 2.5lb iron plate as my counter weight. The results weren’t spectacular because pulling focus was a huge problem… BUT the shots were very smooth.

I learned the lesson of inertia – I needed more weight.

I kept the 2.5lb iron plate as my counter weight and i added more washers to the camera plate to add more top weight.

Next, I wanted to do something with the cables so I wouldn’t have to be taping up the device every single time I went out. Also the cable that was running into my camera was sometimes getting caught on the handle and it would rotate the camera around when in a certain position. I had to clean this up.

I drilled two holes in the Glidecam shaft and ran an old RCA cable (which I cut off the connectors so the wire would fit the holes and soldered new heads on). I ran this wire inside the shaft underneath the gimbal so there would be no interference between the cable and the movement of the glidecam.

For the battery holder, I took two aluminum L beams cut to length and bolted them to the glidecam so that the battery would hold nice a snuggly between them. This eliminated all use of gaffers tape.

Last but not least, when I was sampling the Steadicam, I noticed they had a stand on which they hung the stabalizer when not in use… so I made my own using only a few pieces of iron pipe and a heavy duty light/stand or c-stand:

Two years of effort of DIY to get this point. I’m very happy with how far I’ve gone with this project – most importantly I’m making money with this device and the clients love the way it looks. Still it’s not perfect – I see a lot of small flaws in this demo footage I shot, but that’s all part of the game in DIY…

 

Some sample footage (before I put the RCA cable inside the shaft and added the battery mount)

Franken Glidecam Demo from John Hess on Vimeo.

Here’s some shots of me running around with the rig… not as interesting as the Salsa version but…


Franken-Glidecam Demo from John Hess on Vimeo.

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