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(00:00):
Sometimes you just don't have the budget to hire a camera operator. You want a camera follow, you want someone to follow you around, but you just don't have the budget for it or the time, or it's just a quick shot that you just want. Maybe your gimbal could do the job for you. Sometimes you just don't have the budget to hire a camera operator. You want a camera follow, you want someone to follow you around, but you just don't have the budget for it or the time, or it's just a quick shot that you just want. Maybe your gimbal could do the job for you. The opening shot you just saw was shot on the LUMIX GH7 while mounted on a DJI RS4 gimbal using Active Track. Active Track is a lot of things, but one of the things it is is a collaboration between DJI and LUMIX to make the gimbal follow you around based off of the face detection autofocus in the cameras.

(00:47):
This is compatible with quite a long list of LUMIX cameras and gimbals. This certainly isn't new technology, but we've seen this evolve over time and as you saw in the opening shot, while I wouldn't call it an absolutely perfect track, it really does do a remarkably cool job. Now what you saw in the opening sequence was the camera set to Open Gate. So I had a lot of room to reframe, not only reposition but even punch into the shot, and I did take advantage of that to reframe it, to make it a little bit more tight the way I really wanted it. Now that said I was shooting Open Gate, meaning the camera had a lot more room to move and I think it actually took advantage of that. I'm going to be doing some more tests later on. We'll see later in the video where I'm shooting both in Open Gate and in standard 16:9,

(01:25):
and we'll take it outside so we can see it in the real world. Now, one of the things about this DJI RS4 Gimbal, which DJI did send out to me so that I could specifically do this little tutorial on combining it with the LUMIX cameras. One of the things about it is it has gotten remarkably easier to balance over the years. This is the RS4. I've had an RS3, an RS2, an SC before that I think, and I've had some gimbals that are by other brands and I got to say that every generation of the DJI Gimbal gets easier and easier to balance. I remember my first ones being so frustrating to balance, but now it's super easy and one of the things that makes it easier is there's some kind of new Teflon coating on these arms that makes it easier to slide things around and get 'em into position.

(02:05):
So it's actually so easy to do, that I'm going to throw this completely off balance and just balance it for you live so you can see just how quickly it goes. So I'm going to go ahead and drop this table down so that we can get a better view of this and yeah, let's get this thing done. Alright, everything's balanced. Let's mess it up. I'm just going to start unlocking things and sliding this around. So the camera that's on here is the Lumix GH7 and it has the 10-25 mm lens, which is quite a large lens on here. And on top of that I've got the little RØDE Wireless Pro receiver. And there I think that is pretty sufficiently off balance. Let's just lock everything down. Oh I didn't move this one. There we go. That's moved as well. So now everything has been moved.

(02:44):
If I unlock so that it moves freely, we should see this thing being massively and horribly off balance there. Alright, so let's start it up. Y'know there are I think specific orders of things that you're supposed to do these in. I have found I just have my own way of doing it, which seems to work quite well. So let's do that. We're going to start with whatever that direction is. So I'll unlock that… obviously way off… this lock back here; I slide that. There we go. So there it's not quite tilted yet, not quite balanced. So you slide that and the Teflon coating on these arms, that's one of the new things, does make it easier to slide these around. So let's see. That's pretty close there. I think that's pretty good. All right, we're going to call that good. I'm going to lock that in place. We'll come back to the bottom later. The top one here. Let's see. This needs to be staying upright like that. So we move this forward. Now it's tilting the wrong way. Go back this way. In fact, I can keep repositioning this so you can see it better. Bit more up… a little too far up.

(03:51):
Good. We'll lock that into place. Now forward. It needs to not fall forward. It needs to stay upright. So unlock here. This now has a little rail so you can do really fine adjustments on here, which really helps to get that perfectly balanced. So a little farther forward and we're good. All right, lock that into place. And then finally, we do need to lock these for this part. We tilt this forward and it should stay like, so that's off. Move this, slide it back a little more back a little bit more back. Yeah, a little bit more. Great. Flip that around the other way. Verify it stays this way. Love it. Alright, that is balanced. Let's unlock everything. Turn on the gimbal and it's in place. The little balance guy shows in green, so I think we're good to go. And one of the other really cool features about this generation of gimbal is the auto lock. So it's obviously freely moving. Now if I push the power button, once everything locks into place and now it's locked. Push it again…

(05:09):
and you can hear the locks unlocking it is now freely moving. So even if it's really off, let's go ahead and tilt it way over here and up here, down there. And I'll push the button to lock it, it locks. That's really cool. Now, one of the other new features on this gimbal is the ability to flip this into a vertical orientation. Now as a LUMIX shooter, I probably am not going to use this because if I want vertical and landscape video, I'll just shoot in Open Gate. But for those watching this who don't have Open Gate on their cameras, watch how easy this is. I'm going to disconnect the camera cable here just so it doesn't get in the way. And if I want to rotate this vertically, all I have to do is unlock that, squeeze these two, flip this sideways, put that back in, lock that down. And now we've got vertical movement. Now it is showing… it's kind of flashing between green and red, so it might need a little tiny bit of rebalancing, but it is for the most part, still working there just fine. I want to flip it back again. Let's lock it, unscrew this, squeeze that off, flip it back into place.

(06:20):
Away we go. Unlock and we're back in business. That's pretty cool. Now let's see what it takes to make the LUMIX camera communicate with the DJI RS4 gimbal. It's actually really easy to do. I've got this HDMI cable hooked up just to record the menu so you can see what I'm doing in here. And the only thing you need to really set is the USB mode and the auto focus. If you go to the setup menu, then to in and out, then to USB and USB mode, by default it's going to be set to “Select on Connection”, which is fine, but that just means that every time you plug in your camera to your gimbal, you're going to have to manually choose “PC Tether”, which is the mode that you need. Unless you're regularly connecting your camera to your computer to copy files off and regularly need it

(07:03):
in the PC storage mode, I would just go into the menu and set it to PC Tether by default. That means that when you connect it, you won't have to choose a menu; it'll just work. Then you need your auto-focus mode set to Human Face Detection. So in the AF mode, you want to make sure that AF detection is turned on for person. And then you go into the display menu and you can choose between human eye, face and body or human eye and face. And this actually works with animal detection as well. If you're chasing your dog around with the gimbal, I would recommend setting it to human eye and face and body. That way if you get farther away from the gimbal that the camera can't find your face anymore, it can still track you by your body. So I would definitely recommend that.

(07:41):
And that's it for the camera. Set the right USB mode or just choose it every time you plug in the camera and set the right auto-focus mode. From there, we're going to take a USB cable, plug that into the camera, and then the other end goes into the camera port on the gimbal. We can see the USB tether icon has appeared. Let's turn the camera around. You can see the back of the camera how it's finding my face in there. All I have to do is push this trigger once. That's it. And now it's found me. I'll go ahead and start recording. And that's it. Now it's following me around. Literally all you have to do is plug in the camera, make sure the right USB mode is selected, make sure that human face detection is turned on, and then squeeze that trigger once with some subject in view and it locks onto them,

(08:24):
and there you go. Now let's take a look at this iFootage, Cobra 3 monopod. And I'll tell you why I think this is such a good pairing. First of all, the monopod does come with a standard video ahead, of course, but I've removed that so that I can have the quick release plate attached directly to the bottom of the gimbal handle. And the gimbal does come with a small tripod as well. You can of course just attach that on and have it sitting on the table just like this and it sit a little bit lower than it is right now. But that's what that configuration by default is for. But with this configuration, now if I want to raise this up on a monopod, put it up higher or even use it as an extended arm, I can do this super easily. First of all, to release this from the feet, all I have to do is pull down on that collar; that snaps into place and now I can lift that up and it's free. Put it back in;

(09:08):
I just rest it in, push down so it snaps in and we're good to go. And now it's attached. So to attach the monopod part of this, release that, let's grab the monopod here. I'll go ahead and attach this onto here. Let's now take this and put it on the ground, snap that into place. And now with one hand I can raise and lower this Cobra 3 monopod. It is so cool to be able to do that. It's so easy. Now I've got my foot on the bottom of the tripod there to keep it extra stable. But this one release, just squeeze that and lower is super fantastic. So now of course I can use this as a freestanding monopod for having this track me as I run around. Or if I wanted to, I could simply raise this up and use it as a extended arm.

(09:58):
I have found that it's perfectly stable when kept at lower heights like this. If you do raise the monopod all the way up as high as it goes and you do the active track, it does tend to wobble a little bit. I'd be a little bit cautious keeping it that high, but certainly at these lower heights, eye level or so, it is perfectly stable. Alright, let's take this thing outside and see how this behaves in the real world. Now we're testing it in Open Gate. Now I'm going to walk around here a little bit while I tell you about the sponsor; Backblaze! We all know that backup is super, super important, but it's also kind of boring. I mean, no one wants to think about it, but the last thing that you want to think about other than backup is not being backed up. So Backblaze makes backup super easy, kind of like this; super easy. Look,

(10:41):
it's just following me everywhere I go! This is incredible! Alright, let's switch to 16:9. Now we're in 16:9. So the cool thing about Backblaze is it's super easy. You install it and it just runs in the background making sure you're always backed up. And it's not just your internal hard drive. Even if you plug in an external drive, it'll back that up too. That's one of the coolest things about it. All of your media, your photos, your videos on all your external drives can all be backed up with just one account. That's kind of crazy, kind of like this! It's kind of crazy. Look, backup may not be the most fun thing in the world to think about, but with Backblaze it's super easy. Just set it and forget it. Go to backblaze.com/PhotoJoseph and install a free trial and get started

(11:21):
now. You've got nothing to lose, well except your data, if you don't start backing up! Back up today! The last thing that I want to show you is this focus motor that is included as part of this kit. This, by the way, is the DJI RS4 combo kit, not the pro. There's an even bigger one. This is the combo kit and this focus motor does come with it. And you can use this for Zoom as I've got it set up here on this 10 to 25 lens. And now you have Zoom control from the gimbal's joystick on here. But you can also use that for focus or iris control depending on what you need. Now on this lens, because it is a non-geared, non-cinema lens, I've got this little funky rubber strap that comes with the gimbal that allows you to do the focus control.

(12:02):
It's not ideal. It's better to have a 3D printed one if you are going to use this a lot on a lens that doesn't have the gearing or of course to use lenses that have gearing like this SIRUI anamorphic here that's got the gears built in. And what's cool, you'll notice that a lens like this has two sets of gears. You can actually put multiple gearing motors on here and then through the little switches on the side, you determine what it's controlling. Focus, iris or zoom, that's the FIZ. And then you can control all of that from the gimbal. So it's a pretty sweet setup there. Now one of the things you can do with the mechanical lens is add on – it doesn't come with it, but add on – the LIDAR system. Now, I did a video on the original LIDAR system like two or three years ago.

(12:41):
I actually still have it here. It's the one that was part of the RS2 Pro whatever whatever kit. And this thing was so cool a couple of years ago. I need to play with a new one and see how good it is, how much better it's gotten. And thinking about this, tell me in the comments if you know, but could I use the face detection of the LUMIX cameras just to track the camera but not have auto-focus turned on; actually be using a mechanical lens and combine that with LIDAR. So I'd get a face tracking auto focus, LIDAR controlled lens. Do you think that'd work? If that's something you want to see, let me know in the comments. I may have to get one of those LIDAR kits and try that out. That just sounds awesome. Now this stuff is just, you can tell, it kind of makes me happy. This is cool stuff. Alright. Hey, thanks DJI. Thanks iFootage. Thanks Backblaze. This has been a fun video and I'll see you guys in the next one.