Peter Abraham

How much does it weigh?

Ill take one!! Lovely work there, Afton. Blemished or not, whichever. Lemme know how to pay. I use a Matthews Beefy Babybstand. Can measure diameter tomorrow. Best, Peter Abraham, S.O.C.

Just so you know, those links take us to Square- and do not show your products. Perhaps it is my browser, but it says, " Sorry we could not find that item".

I'm very interested. Will commit to it now, pending a quick chat with Robert. Best to all, Peter Abraham, S.O.C.

Compatibility. Anything to avoid investing in yet ANOTHER species of cables !!!

Good article with link to the video transfer of some of the shots from the original demo reel for Steadicam. I've watched it twice already. Completely inspiring. Peter Abraham, S.O.C.

DC Converter Box. I'm ordering two now. One to use on my Director's monitor hand held bracket. The other as a catch-all with some extra open wire cables. Neat ! Peter Abraham, S.O.C.

Thanks !! I contacted him today.

Preferably in NYC area. Anyone currently using a machine shop that has CNC machines. Would prefer it is not just a guy who owns one. Would like to find a larger shop. Just poking around for a source. Will be glad to work with anyone in the USA, but sure would like it to be in the NY/NJ/CT area... This isn't a jobber or one-off bit. Anyone? Best, Peter Abraham, S.O.C.

You learn something new everyday.

Oh sweet!! I like this. May go with this over ACF50.

Absolutely the best solution. ( Pun intended ) Since I don't have any on hand, I used what I used. Had I had a spray bottle of it, I'd have doused each screw in it.

Yeah, but do they smell like a Greek salad? ;)

The heads are too high. And yes, they do make lots of different lengths on the threaded end. I could look for slightly shorter threading, but the cap heads must be ground down or they do not clear the plate/stage. The remarkable amount of tightening force I can apply with ease opposed to using a flathead screwdriver makes this work for me.

I'm a big fan of making my own camera lockdown screws. Early on, pre-Steadicam, I was aware of how gored up ( for lack of a better term ) the slot in a regular lockdown screw was after repeated use. Most lockdown screws have a slot wider than many screwdrivers. ( Yes, I know, Filmtools and others make a splendid thick-bladed "T" handled Vüunder-tool. I wish I owned one. ) My solution 28-odd years ago was to go to McMaster-Carr. Buy a box of 3/8-16 socket head bolts. Grind down the head ( so there is clearance for the underside of the plate-to-top of stage area ) and grind down the shaft. The shaft length was a dicey thing. Even a few threads too many could insure damage to some older film camera bodies. ( We are talking 1986-era ) Some bodies had important boards mounted in the area of the Helicoil or otherwise moulded into place 3/8-16 insert. I always ground down the shaft to match the regular slotted lockdown screws. While this may seem an awful lot of work, consider one of the real pains in the butt for single-hole lockdown cameras. When is the last time you ran just one screw into a body without running a strip of 1" camera tape down the underside of the body on each side of the hole? This, in a valiant effort to reduce or eliminate rotation of the camera once it's mounted onto the sled. While a tripod situation will do just fine with a slotted camera lockdown screw, trying a whip pan and finding the camera body rotating freely on its screw is always somewhat disheartening. The socket head offers me an immense amount of torque because an "L" Allen key or "T" Allen wrench grabs in a way that ( I would assert ) no flathead screwdriver can. And so, every few years, the ritual of grinding down a handful more of the machine screws. Put on some music, blast away and make a ton of sparks. Kind of soothing in a way. Until today. There is nothing remarkable about today's weather. High in the low 90's (f) and medium humidity. I ground away, tossing each sizzling hot screw into a bin of water to cool it down post-grind. After an hour or so, I had about 10 workable machine screws ( and two I'd utterly bollixed up by grinding them too far because my mind wandered. :D ) Finished up. Dumped out the water and set the little plastic bin containing the new lockdown screws into the car. Drove in to Manhattan to pick up my Dearly Beloved™ when she wrapped her shoot. In the 80-odd minutes that I was in the car, the machine screws went from black and damp to dry and rusty. Not covered of course, but with deep rust marks and streaks all over all of them. Remarkable. Never seen anything like this. Now, I get it. The intense heat drove the oils out of the surface layers of the metal, the dousing drenched the oils away and the metal was painfully dry. But- rust in an hour more or less? Weird as hell. Having labored over them, I couldn't very well throw them out. I decided to heat them slowly and oil them up again, hoping that the oil would soak in enough to prevent any rust from forming. In a moment of culinary/cinematic inspiration, I doused the machine screws with Extra Virgin Olive oil from Greek Kalamata olives. See attached photo. :D I then set the small square cast iron pan onto the stove and ran a flame for a few moments. Repeating this effort, and turning the bolts now and again. As I went to heat up dinner in the oven, in they went to get hot to about 325º (f again. ) They're still sitting in the oven, cooling. I do plan to warm them one more time to thin the oil enough to rub off all extraneous lubrication. Then let them cool. Either I've come up with a tasty new way to cure and protect hardened steel machine screws, or in a few weeks these screws are going to REEK as the oil goes rancid. I'm kinda curious to see which way it goes. An amusing way to pass a quiet day in the home office. The temptation was IMMENSE to "infuse" the machine screws with a scent by drizzling peppermint oil onto them as they cooked.... ;) Peter Abraham, S.O.C.

His passport expired in March but no worries- he's been using a tunnel that runs from Greenwich to Mamaroneck. Brilliant and timely !!!! :D I agree with the thoughts that leaving the K Section in place is wise. I've been mulling this over the last few days, and really have had a change of heart. Formerly advocating pulling it off, one must now run 3-4 batteries to load enough weight down below to overcome the loss of length from stage to sled bottom. Better to make use of the framework that exists. Sled Bottom Porn. Sounds very Dark Net to me...

Off-Topic for Steadicam Operating but this was the place to put this. Anyone in need of a roommate? I've got a friend, known him his entire life, currently living in Brooklyn and apparently his roommate situation has blown up. He's got a steady job, is sane, not in our industry, and I'd trust him without doubt with my grandson, my rig, anything. Seriously. Solid fun guy. Anyone looking or with a good roommate lead, text or call me? Best to all, Peter Abraham, S.O.C. 917-453-1219

Hi all. Indeed, I had a back injury but before I relate an encapsulated version of it, this cautionary remark. As others have mentioned, we all use our body and react to treatment and are built slightly differently. A lot of the advice listed is incredibly useful and quite primal to good Steadicam Operating. Not loading the spine- which means good Operating posture. Natural strides, working with the machine not against it and so on. What works for me may hold no water for anyone else. Anecdotal evidence IS useful in my opinion- all of the evidence and situations related above, and below this post, are of value because of the unique thing we do to our bodies when we put on a Steadicam or other stabilizing system. In September of 2000 a ladder slid out from under me while at home doing some wiring. I have an open fracture of the L-3 vertibra with some disk damage immediately above. Additionally, the spinal facets from L-3 down in to the Sacral have lost most of their sinovial fluid from the compression/ impact. This resulted in arthritis. My fracture, while looking more like this I / than like this II is now stable due to a procedure called Percutaneous Vertebroplasty. Fancy phrase ! Anyway, it stabilized the break. Prior to the treatment and for years after, I couldn't wear a full sized rig because of the pain levels. The inherent distribution of the pressure of the weight focused on- sadly- the lower Lumbar. Chris Fawcett's Exovest resolved those issues because of the main area of pressure. It is now between the shoulder blades instead of centered around L-1 to L-4. Nice !! Back to operating these last two years. All is good there. Now to treatments. I would recommend getting a good second opinion. Find someone who specializes in sports medicine. What we do is essentially asymmetrical sport. Those doctors, ortho surgeons and neurosurgeons are more familar with this type of stress on the spine than those Dr's who focus in on static work-related injuries. Just my two cents. Find a few of the right KIND of Dr's. When discussing short- and long-term treatment with your main Dr, discuss the use of a T.E.N.S. Unit. These small battery operated devices are used to increase blood flow in the area stimulated. They are entirely non-invasive. When dealing with a broken bone, they do greatly accelerate the time needed for a break to heal. In the case of soft tissue injury/ pain, the increased blood flow does seem to ameliorate pain. This is ENTIRELY subjective, and may do nothing for you. However, you can likely borrow a small unit from a Dr. and see how it does for you. I rarely use mine now. Maybe after a brutally long concert or somesuch if I'm sore. Otherwise, it gets pulled out when we travel to visit people. Some mattresses are so fugly in terms of lack of comfort that I'm more sore from that than from running the rig on a long day. :) While a slipped disk is in of itself painful, in my experience the resulting inflammation and then resulting pressure on the surrounding nerve bundles is the source of most of the pain one feels while awaiting diagnosis and during early treatment phases. Inquire as to the use of heat, cold, T.E.N.S. Unit therapy and other treatments ( such as Mechanical Inversion Tables to assist the surrounding tissues and control swelling and pain. This kind of swelling and pain is a very vicious cycle. One suffers an event. A disk slips out of true. The swelling produces pain, which produces more swelling as a reaction, causing more pain and sometimes radiating far beyond the impact that JUST the slipped disk might be having on the body. Rough stuff. One final entirely subjective bit. Inversion Tables are without a doubt the Operator's friend. If I had the room I would own one. Using gravity to open up the spine in a gentle manner after a day of work ( or at lunch !! ) is quite remarkable-feeling. Find a way to try one out. Forget an injury. They just feel great after work.

Sometimes it's just impossible to find things using an iPad..... Stills from the shoot. :)

Awesome. She got tapped by the Wachowski Brothers to shoot footage on their new project. Cool motorcycle and walking shots. Get in here and tell all Kat !! Can't link directly, Google this: The Wachowskis shoot scenes for Sense8 at Dyke March in San Francisco Best to all, Peter Abraham, S.O.C.

Geoff, In fact I did not have to loosen the tiny knurled knobs on my set before adjusting fore/aft or side/side. This made for a great situation- since a tools-free stage was but one of many calling cards of the Master Series rigs. The black anodizing against black anodizing slid very nicely. Best, Peter

Not only respect for the endurance- but lovely Operating and sideline positioning. I've only seen bits and pieces but I've seen the Steadicam Operator purposely position himself/herself so that if there's a referee call, they've got an over the shoulder of the ref with the field of play in the background. That's playing head's-up camerawork. Nicely done.

The top cap on the gimbal itself has worked slightly loose. Hold the gimbal handle and turn the top cap. It will likely turn tighter slightly. Finger tighten it as best as you can. If you are using a spanner wrench, TIGHTEN IT VERY SLIGHTLY as over-tightening will cause the threads to lock up forever and ever and ever and ever. This click or thump occurs as you tilt and the inner bearing races slide up the inside of the gimbal, and "top out". Good luck, let us know how it goes. Best, Peter Abraham, S.O.C.

Another thought. I once had to do a 60 second Don Juan shot followed by a 59 minute lock-off. We were shooting 30 minute BetaCam SP loads. QUITE painful, but there was not way around it. I'd tracked President Clinton and Leonardo DiCaprio along the flagstone path past the Rose Garden, turned and walked along the covered walkway outside of the West Wing of the White House and then boomed down and locked as they sat in white wrought iron chairs just outside of the French doors leading into the Oval Office. Both single shot cameras were in place and waiting for me to walk them in. There was no stopping to remove the camera and set it onto sticks, the conversation was not allowed to be interrupted. What I did to make that long time bearable is shift radically in my posture. Once a question was asked and the answer was being delivered in earnest, I knew the wide two-shot would likely not be cut to a lot. I took the opportunity go to from Missionary to wrong-sided Missionary. The sled on the same side of my body as the arm socket block. Then I'd quickly turn around into Don Juan and stand that way for a while. All to try to control the cramping that was creeping up on me. If you are in this kind of situation, at the very least make sure you're remarkably GOOD at locking off in Don Juan ( something everyone should be good at anyway..... sorry, Charles. :P ). It absolutely helped make the day for me. It was unpleasant but unavoidable and they got their clean lock-offs from me. Used: Master Series Elite sled, MS arm, Model I vest. Best to all, Peter Abraham, S.O.C.

This thread is 10 years old and the solid info from Muhlstock and others is every bit as relevant. Sometimes we love our Interwebs. One tidbit to update: As it turns out, recent research proves the use of tonic water ( or just plain Quinine ) to control leg cramps to be 100% bullshit. Live and learn !! On the OTHER hand, potassium is quite useful in this regard. Adam Keith eats a banana before Good Morning America. Since he's been operating every day since 1992 when he took my Rockport workshop, he's eaten over 7,500 bananas. :)