How To Build A Butter-Smooth Video Slider
Jul 31, 2014
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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You know those shots where a camera is pointing at an out of focus object and then it slowly goes into focus. Sometimes this is done by focus racking (or focus pulling) but sometimes it’s done by actually moving the camera until the object gets inside the depth of field.
The secret to doing it right with camera movement is to get the movement really (REALLY!) smooth. You can probably do it with a table dolly, but to get a really smooth movement you need to use something with bearings. Luckily, there is another industry that uses sliders with bearings – the furniture industry.
Photographer Romero Dominguez shares a pretty nice hack on how to build a slider with a couple of drawers sliding guide rails and a few scraps of metal. Depending on your needed length, those starts as little as $15.
The tutorial breaks the slider into three parts:
Bracket:
Slider:
and Stand
and I estimate the build to be around 5-10 minutes sans the trip to home depot for the part.
Head over to In Mg Bag for the full tutorial.
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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5 responses to “How To Build A Butter-Smooth Video Slider”
Ah… DSLR video, with all it’s ‘cool production value’ toys and accessories. I remember in the old days ( Super 8, yes it was a serious medium ) we’d ‘borrow’ wheelchairs from the local hospital to use for dolly shots!
That’s not smooth at all and the slider would be loud as hell, ruining the audio recording (more important then the image) .
The movement is very smooth and without any noise! ;)
Nope. Marcus is right. That example footage is terribly jerky. Almost unwatchable.
Terribly sorry mate. It might be a cost effective solution, but that
video is far from smooth. Either the slider or the technique has to be
changed here. It was too jerky, and the flaws are magnified when you’re
so close to the subject. I’m sure it’s something that can probably be
improved upon, but whatever you’ve used in the video isn’t smooth enough