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This is a video that was posted to YouTube a while ago but doesn’t seem to have seen much traffic. It was posted by the channel Handy Bear (aka, Michel), and unlike most camera slider motorisation conversions these days, there’s not a 3D printer in sight!
The Slider shown in the video is just a cheap one Michel found online. It looks like many inexpensive sliders, and these are often the best candidates for a motor conversion. An Arduino Nano controls the electronics.
Panasonic has announced PanaTrack, an interesting and somewhat unique motorised camera slider/dolly track system. It’s essentially a big bendy track along which you can run your camera. How big? Well, the minimum length is 2 metres. The maximum length is 50 metres, with travel speeds of up to 1.4 metres per second. PanaTrack is targeted to events, concerts, corporate, conferences, cinema and TV shows running on a low budget.
PanaTrack appears to have been developed by Panasonic in conjunction with Waterbird Systems. Exactly how much of a role each company played in the device’s development is unknown, but Waterbird has a pretty solid reputation for flexible camera tracks. Panasonic describes it as a “highly flexible camera track system by Waterbird” So, it may be that it’s been developed by Waterbird and is simply being branded and sold by Panasonic.
You know what goes really well with onion? Hotdogs! Accessories brand YC Onion have introduced its all-new updated motorized slider, the Hotdog 3.0. DIYP got to see the slider in action.
The slider comes in four different lengths: 60, 80, 100 and 120 centimetres. It can easily manage 20 kilos of weight when horizontal and up to 14K at a 45-degree angle. Carrying the Hotdog 3.0 weighs in at just 6.5K, making it a pretty portable option.
This is a pretty novel idea for a camera slider, called Slidee from maker Shivam Dehinwal. It has no motors, no Bluetooth, no electronics at all and no batteries. It’s built around a regular retractable tape measure. Well, ok, a not-quite-regular retractable tape measure. It’s built specifically around the Komelon Touch Lock measuring tape because it has built-in speed control – which is important when you want to control how quickly your camera moves.
It’s very cool, using a simple 3D printed housing with some bearing wheels and a simple mechanism to hold the retraction button at different positions to adjust the retraction speed. Essentially, the button acts like a variable speed control. The harder you push it, the quicker it retracts. You will, of course, need a 3D printer – or a friend willing to make the printed components – but this is about as simple as it gets.
Trexo Innovation has announced their new Trexo Slider, a motorised mini slider aimed at content creators who like to pack a small lightweight kit. Designed to handle everything from DSLR and mirrorless cameras to smartphones, it allows for shooting of both video and timelapse, with speeds ranging from a super slow 0.001mm/sec up to a rather nippy 30mm/sec. It’s also strong enough for vertical slides up to a rate of 25mm/sec.
It’s launching via Kickstarter and claims to be “the world’s most compact camera slider”. I’m not entirely sure about that claim, but it is pretty small. Unlike most camera sliders on the market, the Trexo slider uses a leadscrew instead of a belt for camera movement, allowing for smaller movement increments, increased accuracy and better torque for moving heavier cameras.
YC Onion has only been around for a couple of years, but they’ve made some impressive kit since they first launched. Their latest is a new take on a familiar filmmaking tool – the motorised camera slider. This one, called Chips 3.0, isn’t just a slider, though. Oh no, it’s also a motorised tripod dolly, and it can even turn into a 5-axis motion control system with your gimbal on the top of it.
The Chips 3.0 can communicate with a variety of DJI, Zhiyun and Feiyutech gimbals to provide full 4-axis control for videos and timelapse. You get your X linear movement on the slider as normal, but you also get pitch (tilt), yaw (pan) and roll on the gimbal, too. The fifth, of course, is your focus motor. As a still-new company, YC Onion is taking to Indiegogo to launch this one.
DIY camera sliders come in all shapes and sizes… Well, sizes, anyway. They’re usually all a pretty similar shape. Long poles along which a platform moves. But this one, I thought, was particularly interesting. Not all of the information has been released on it yet, although it’s expected to be teased over the next day or two as the video gains more attention.
It was posted to YouTube by MERT Arduino & Tech and like many DIY sliders, it’s powered by an Arduino. What makes this one stand out particularly, though, is that it features a joystick remote control, letting you operate it from afar without having to touch it.
Building your own motorised camera gimbal or slider seem to be the in thing at the moment. In fact, I built one myself recently (that’s for another post, though). This one, though, from Michael Klements at The DIY Life is pretty cool and incorporates a slider with a motorised pan axis so that it can track a subject as it moves from one end of the rail to the other.
It’s a total DIY project with a bunch of off-the-shelf parts and 3D printed components that Michael has designed himself. And while he doesn’t appear to have released the project under an open-source license, he has made the STL files and the source code available to download so that you can have a go at building your own.
The SliderMini 2 is Smartta’s latest iteration of the SliderMini, its small form factor motorised slider. It’s largely the same as the original and you can read that review here, but it has received a couple of significant changes since the original that allows it to offer much more versatility.
Like the original, the SliderMini 2 is a super-compact slider that allows for easy portability for use just about anywhere. I’ve been using the SliderMini 2 for the past few weeks now in order to try to answer two very specific questions. But first, how about some pretty (yes, I know that’s subjective) sample footage shot using it?
When Smartta announced the original SliderMini camera slider in 2018, we were all quite excited. It was launched on Indiegogo and for what they were selling for, it offered some fantastic features. We eventually got our hands on one and you can read our review of the original here. It’s a product I still receive questions about on social media and still use regularly.
Well, Smartta has announced the SliderMini 2, which offers some significant upgrades over the original, including a more powerful motor for vertical slides, up to 52 hours of battery life and a new “curve” mode which lets you tweak the speed profiles of your slides, timelapses and stop motion. And this time, it’s just straight up for pre-order. No crowd funding.
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.
Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe
Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.
John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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