Enrico Grillo

Thanks for the input! I will try to capture some video when I get a chance. I am having to lower the gimbal a lot because my sled is bottom-heavy enough to give me sub 1-second drop times. I'm flying a fairly light camera, so I've added weight to the top stage, but even with that I am easily having to put four inches between the docking collar and the gimbal. I can try to add more weight to the top stage and reduce whatever I can on the bottom of the sled to see if a higher gimbal eliminates some of the sway/drifting I am seeing. On the balancing pin, the sled does come to a stop, however it isn't always perfectly level. It leans just a tiny bit off center, and when pushed, doesn't seem to reliably stop at the same place each time. I don't feel resistance as-per-se in the gimbal, but this contributes to my suspicion that the gimbal could be a problem. I just bought some new bubble levels to check leveling of the sled as I don't trust the ones built into the sled – they seem imprecise, so I need better measurement before I can say for sure how accurate the balance is on the pin.

I am a very new operator, and I am flying a knockoff rig from a brand I do not care to write down here because I am not yet in a place to drop $5,000+ on a rig. I am aware that running a cheap rig is not helping me, however given the parameter that it is what I have to work with right now, I'm trying to track down the likely cause of an issue I am seeing: I have my rig built with a fairly light camera (though I have tried adding weight to the stage with no real change). I balance the sled static and dynamic, drop is a healthy 2 seconds, etc. Everything feels balanced in general, but when I actually fly the sled it has a tendency to lazily drift a degree or so back and forth when at rest. I can get the arm fairly steady in a stationary position but the gimbal just kinda keeps drifting around. The drift is more or less circular, not listing towards a specific direction, and everything else seems to match what I have seen in demos and guides. I would intuitively think that this was caused by a top-heavy sled, but the sled drops correctly and this happens even when I fly almost no weight on the stage or with a lot of weight at the bottom of the sled. Is this likely just the result of a cheap gimbal, or are there common causes of this behavior in how the rig is built and balanced? I don't trust this rig to perform like a real steadicam, but I also don't want to bake operator error into my practice and just blame it on cheap equipment.

My bias here is due to a background in tech (as a software engineer), however NFT's don't have a future. In reality, they are nothing more than a cryptographic signature that you are connected to some piece of data that in turn points to a piece of media, however they provide no actual connection to the media – the original media can still be shared and distributed independent of the record of "ownership". Owning an NFT of your video or GIF or image or whatever doesn't actual prevent transfers or copying, nor do they provide proof of who created something. They are a hyped thing right now, but the vast majority of the market is flooded with people creating as much volume of junk art as they can to get in on the wave. There are interesting applications of blockchain technologies, however "proving ownership of digital art" isn't it. My hope is that once NFTs have come and gone there is better discussion about how to compensate artists when their work is popular, preferably in a way that gets them real dollars.