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The Magic Ring II is a grip frame for your gimbal with built-in D-tap power points

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Sometimes, you need to go a little “extra” with your gimbal rig. Sometimes, you need the two-handed holding power that only a solid frame can provide. Digitalfoto’s new Magic Ring II, is one of them. But it’s a little different to most. It allows you to attach a V-Mount battery to its base that passes power through the frame to devices up top.

This means you can attach monitors, transmitters, audio recorders or other devices onto the top of the frame without having to worry about how you’re going to power them or monitoring a bunch of separate smaller batteries. Being able to mount a V-Mount battery underneath also helps to lower the centre of gravity as it takes some of that extra weight away from up high.

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DJI teases a Ronin S2 coming in September 9

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Here is an address you would probably never visit unless you saw it in a DJI official tweet: dji.com/teaser. Aside from a small play of light and a black and red handle we don’t get so see much of the Gimbal.

September 9 is the date for the announcements (it may be the 10th if you live in Australia though). This date falls inside IBC’s original date, or the new online IBC showcase, so I hope its something big.

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The Zhiyun Crane 3S is a big beefy gimbal for big beefy cameras that offers a lot of versatility

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The Zhiyun Crane 3S is the latest iteration of Zhiyun’s flagship line of Crane gimbals, traditionally designed for DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. On first glance, the Crane 3S looks a lot like the Crane 3 LAB, but it definitely holds a few extra tricks up its sleeve.

I’ve been using one for a few weeks now when weather and Scotland’s lockdown rules have allowed and I’m going to go over some of those differences and the advantages the Crane 3S has to offer over the Crane 3 LAB.

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How to make your own DIY Arri Trinity for 1/100th of the price

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For those who’ve never come across it before, the Arri Trinity is an insane $50,000+ (and the camera) gimbal/steadicam hybrid type device that lets you make some really cool and unique shots. We featured it here recently when Potato Jet got to see and try it out for himself and it offers many obvious advantages over other filming techniques.

But most of us don’t have $50k lying around. So, what can we do? Well, we can just make our own. Sort of. In this video, filmmaker James Matthews combines his Zhiyun Weebill S with an old Flycam HD-3000 to produce the “Minity”, letting you get similar shots. Ok, so, it’s not quite the Arri Trinity, but for a hundredth of the budget, what can you really expect?

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Use these three techniques to shoot manual focus lenses on a gimbal

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I don’t shoot on a gimbal all that often. When I do, it’s usually for b-roll. But I’m usually doing it with manual focus lenses. It presents some challenges, but they’re pretty easy to overcome. Sure, plenty of cameras have autofocus these days when shooting video, and it’s getting better and better all the time, although it’s still not perfect.

Imperfect systems that are quite easy to confuse are the problem that wedding photographer and filmmaker Matt Johnson has with autofocus when shooting on a gimbal, too. So, in this video, he talks about three of his top tips for shooting video on a gimbal using manual focus lenses.

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The SMOOTH-X is a sub $60, foldable smartphone Gimbal

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Zhiyun just announced a smartphone gimbal that is cheaper than a cup of soup in some restaurants – the Smooth X. I am actually kinda surprised by the number of features you can cram into a gadget that costs so little.

The biggest highlight of this gimbal is the fact that it folds down to pocket size. Ideally, that would make it easier to have the gimbal ready whenever you want it. In a world that may soon rid of smartphone gimbals (See Huawei P40), this is a big move in the direction of reducing the overhead of carrying another gadget.

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Feiyu goes head-to-head against DJI with their new Pocket Handheld Gimbal camera

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Feiyutech has announced a new camera that looks somewhat familiar. It’s the new Feiyu Pocket Handheld Gimbal – a tiny 4K 60fps 3-axis stabilised camera that can be held easily in your hand. Yeah, it does resemble the DJI Osmo Pocket a little bit huh? Except, this one’s about 2/3rds the price of the DJI, priced at only $249

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The new modular Zhiyun Crane 3S gimbal is built to handle big beefy cameras

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Zhiyun has just announced their new Zhiyun Crane 3S motorised gimbal, and it’s a bit of a monster. It’s based around the design of the Crane 3 LAB, but the Crane 3S is a very different animal indeed. For a start, the weight capacity has been raised to an impressive 6.5kg, thanks to newly engineered motors. It’s not a replacement model for the Crane 3 LAB, but more a higher capacity version of it.

To account for the bulk of the larger weight capacity, the Crane 3S is also modular, allowing you to reconfigure it in different ways to account for different cameras. It features a whopping nine mounting points, has a couple of removable handles, and comes with an arm extension to handle cameras as large as the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro G2.

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The camera in Vivo’s new APEX concept smartphone features a built-in “gimbal”

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It’s amazing how small they can make tech these days. Vivo has unveiled its latest update on the APEX concept line. Famous for showing off some pretty insane concepts for future phones, many of their predictions have come true. Popup selfie cameras, under-screen fingerprint readers, and almost completely button-and-bezel-free designs.

In Vivo’s latest concept device, the front-camera has come back, sitting underneath the display, but the main rear-camera also sees a pretty significant new feature. Taking optical image stabilisation (OIS) to the next level, they’ve essentially built it into a gimbal.

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