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The ROV is a compact portable motorised camera slider you can control with your phone

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Sliders are one of the best tools to come along for those who want to add some interest to their video and timelapse sequences. They come in all shapes and sizes, and many of us own one. I own three. What I don’t have, though, is a good small motorised slider. That’s where Rhino Camera Gear’s new ROV slider hopes to fit in.

Rhino are no newcomers to sliders or timelapse gear, yet the new product is being launched through Kickstarter. And it sees some pretty good early bird deals, too, with backers able to acquire their own ROV slider for as low as $229. It looks like a neat piece of kit. Definitely handy for throwing in your backpack for those impromptu timelapses while out with your phone.

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This DIY Ikea slider costs less than $20 to make yourself

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Good sliders aren’t cheap. Most cheap sliders are rarely good. But when your budget’s ultra low, what are you going to do? Either you buy something that you’ll probably use twice and throw away, or you build your own.

The latter is the option chosen by YouTuber Atti Bear in his most recent video. In it, Atti shows us how he build his slider with items bought from Ikea for a total price of less than $20.

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Build an advanced DIY motion control slider for timelapse and stop motion animation

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Since initially discovering the Arduino, Eduard Puertas has spent a lot of time experimenting with it. It’s all an attempt to make his working life easier. As a stop motion animator, anything that makes his life easier is welcome. The Arduino allows him to automate many tasks that would be difficult to achieve manually. At the very least they’d take him a very long time to get perfect.

Eduard has built many automated motion control systems for his work based off the Arduino, including a slider. Now he’s revising his previous slider design to help improve things a little. He wants to keep the low weight while allowing for a larger load capacity.

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How to make a motorised camera slider with an Arduino and a stepper motor for $75

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Despite the proliferation of sliders, motorised ones are still quite expensive. Without motors, they’ve dropped to ridiculously low prices. But it’s really not that difficult or expensive to convert a standard manual slider into a motorised one.

This video from Max Maker demonstrates how to turn a very inexpensive slider into a more practical and useful one. It takes a little machining and a few parts, but it’s fairly straightforward. It just takes a little planning and a few tools.

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This modular motion control slider fits in your backpack and can be reconfigured 30 different ways

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Sliders and motion control go together like bangers and mash. Or perhaps peanut butter & jelly for my American friends. Unless you just want a super quick grab shot, motion control makes work with a slider go so much more smoothly (pun intended). For timelapse, some form of motion control is pretty much essential for getting even and consistent slides or other camera movements.

There’s a million options already out there from companies like Kessler and Syrp, so what makes the new Starslider so special? Well, on the surface, not much, really. It strikes me as being very similar in application to Syrp’s family of motion control & slider products. But, it does look like it can handle substantially more weight and offer easier balancing with heavy cameras setups.

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How to convert a table top dolly into a computerized time lapse monster

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I have a really wonderful Cognisys Slider controlled by a Stackshot 3D. The Stackshot 3D is a very easy system to set up, program and run. It has one tiny little defect, one that is common in pretty much all sliders. They are bulky, take a while to set up, and typically need two tripods to support them. You really can’t have all that in your backpack ready for that “ah-ha” moment.

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Edelkrone adds motors and motion control from your phone to the SliderONE

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Edelkrone’s popular SliderONE is a pretty elegant and well made slider. Introduced at the end of 2015, the SliderONE is perhaps a little on the short side for some. But, when you only need to move small distances, it does its job extremely well. One thing it has lacked thus far, though, is any kind of motor or motion control system.

That all changes now with Edelkrone’s announcement of the new Motion Module. As one expect, it adds a motor to your slider, so you can get automate some of your process. Motors let you get smoother, cleaner, more even slides, and a whole bunch of other potential features. That’s where Edelkrone’s app comes into play, offering a wealth of options for both timelapse and video shooters.

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This $99 device will motorize any slider

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There are some pricy (and awesome) motorized slider solutions out there (we quite like the Syrp Genie), but they are all kinda expensive. Anything with decent controls (screen/app) is 500$ or upwards. What if you throw some creative thinking into it?

Videographer Nitsan Simantov constructed a variable speed slider motor from a TurnsPro – a $99 egg timer style panning device (kinda like the Genie Mini we reviewed, but $150 cheaper). The idea is to use the TurnsPro as a push/pull device. Connect a piece of string to the thread of the revolving head and tie that string into the slider cart (this is why this built rang a bell with the Syrp Genie).

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Syrp’s new Slingshot is a motion control zipline that lets you dolly your camera for hundreds of feet

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Creating super long slider or dolly shots is something many timelapse photographers and filmmakers dream about doing. For some, hyperlapse techniques and a lot of post production work is the answer. For others, that’s far too much work. When you look at the whole process, you can quickly see why. For others, the solution is a cable cam zipline type system.

It works with the Syrp Genie (review here), to provide you with a level of control that is otherwise difficult to achieve. Until now, though, these have been DIY solutions. In fact, you can see our own DIY Syrp Genie cable cam here. Today, though, Syrp have released their official cablecam, the Slingshot.

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