Preventing the Blair Witch Jitters

Homebuilt Stabilizer with Canon HF-M301 Camcorder

One downside to the ultra-miniaturization camcorders and other video recording devices is the increased difficulty in holding the camera steady. The earliest camcorders, despite their awful video quality by today’s standards, did from a pure stability standpoint have the inherent advantage of larger size and mass going for them. Resting a heavy camera on the shoulder tames some of the worst jitters, but palm-sized cameras simply aren’t large enough in any axis to stabilize against the body.

Using even the simplest video stabilizer with a camcorder can result in a large improvement in picture stability. Optical and digital stabilization in camcorders can only fix a limited amount of camera mishandling – it pays to have a stable platform to start with. Learning to balance and operate a stabilizer effectively will take a fair amount of practice, but even if your movements do initially wallow around a bit when tilting and panning, the worst jitters will be gone almost from the moment you start using it.

I probably shouldn’t start off trying to explain physics behind video stabilizers – it’s a topic that is well-covered elsewhere, and you may want to skip this beginning part if you are more interested in the project.… Read the rest