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Manfrotto’s new 300XM Gimbal features a modular design for maximum versatility

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With as many companies as there are making gimbals these days, and with a whole wave of new ones coming out each year, it’s become difficult for them to stand out from each other. But Manfrotto thinks they’ve found a good approach with their new modular gimbal, that allows you to go from the traditional handled setup to whatever you want by removing and moving bits around at will.

The Gimbal is part of Manfrotto’s new “Move” ecosystem whose core focus is modularity and versatility. The 300XM Gimbal is the central core of that ecosystem and is designed to fit into the workflows of as many filmmaking needs as possible.

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13 Gimbal tricks to up your gimbal game

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Gimbals have become increasingly popular and it’s obvious why. Moves that required master camera operators can now be done with significantly less training. Add the fact that gimbals are becoming more powerful, more affordable, and more features rich, and you have a winning tool. That being said, gimbals still require a learning curve. This series of tips is here to help you get the most out of our gimbal on your next shoot. We got our resident gimbal expert Oleg Balzanov and a super talented dancer, Danielle Stephen to help us teach you these tips.

For this tutorial, we used three pieces of kit. A Manfrotto MVG460 gimbal, a dedicated remote, and a monopod style accessory called a Gimboom. The 460 is a great gimbal with tons of nifty features and a really good payload capacity. AS for the Gimboom, if you have seen their FAST tripod legs, it’s basically a single leg of that tripod. It’s nice to see that Manfrotto saw how monopods are used in tandem with gimbals and created a dedicated product for it.

So without further ado, here are our top 13 gimbal tricks:

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Zhiyun’s new Weebill 2 gimbal has a built in flippy out touchscreen LCD

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Zhiyun has today (yes, today, not yesterday) announced the new Zhiyun Weebill 2 gimbal. A couple of retailers jumped the gun a little early yesterday, but now, Zhiyun has made it official. It looks a lot like the Weebill S, but it has a neat flippy out full-colour touchscreen LCD and a few other tricks up its sleeve.

As well as the new LCD, the Weebill 2 dumps the 18650 batteries in favour of a built-in battery that you can charge while you’re using it (with USB-PD support!) and features a new Infineon sensor which Zhiyun says improves its overall performance.

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The Moza Moin Camera is a tiny gimbal camera with a huge touchscreen LCD

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Gudsen has launched its first camera. It’s the tiny gimbal stabilised Moza Moin Camera with a big 2.45″ flippy out touchscreen LCD. The lens offers a nice wide 120° field of view with a 1/2.3″ sensor. It shoots 12-megapixel photos, shoots 4K video at 60 frames per second,  or offers 1080p slow motion at 200 frames per second.

Designed to shoot both what you see as well as for vloggers, the Moin Camera’s view can face either forward in the direction you’re looking or back towards yourself when you want to speak to the camera and keeps it steady whichever way it’s pointed and it can also track your face to ensure you’re always the centre of attention.

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This little single-axis gimbal lets you shoot wider cinematic footage on racing drones

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With most drones that have built-in cameras with stabilisation, we typically see fully motorised 3-axis gimbals that can compensate for just about any movement of the gimbal and keep the camera locked onto the subject. For those that don’t have built-in cameras and gimbals, most people typically attach something like an Insta360 ONE R, GoPro or DJI Osmo Action and rely on electronic image stabilisation and horizon levelling.

But horizon levelling has one big issue. It has to zoom in and crop when it’s off-axis. Can a single-axis gimbal solve this issue and always allow your camera to see the full, wide field of view of which it’s capable? According to Nurk FPV, yes, it absolutely can. And in this video, he shows us why with the Quark single-axis gimbal.

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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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