What is a Phone Gimbal

The skateboarding itself is pretty cool, but what sticks out most is how stable the footage is. As it turns out, the secret isn’t some black magic but rather a pretty neat accessory known as a gimbal stabilizer.
A gimbal is a tool that uses motors and intelligent sensors to support and stabilize a camera, meaning you can film silky smooth video footage while on the move.
How Does A Gimbal Work
In Hollywood, film producers typically employed very expensive Dollys or Steadicams that use physical moving parts to keep things steady. These tools are not computer-assisted, so they require the operator to be highly skilled in using them.
Gimbals, on the other hand, are a more recent digital kind of miniature stabilizer. They have their very own little brain and use sophisticated motion detecting abilities to essentially differentiate between the videographer’s intentional movements and unwanted camera shake.
Let’s consider your phone for a minute. It most likely has accelerometers and gyroscopes built-in, enabling it to sense when you’ve flipped the screen or lifted it off the table.
A gimbal also has all that sensing capability, PLUS some moving pivots and a camera mount. By utilizing quiet brushless motors that make micro-adjustments to the arms, the mounted camera can be completely steady, just like when you lift and move a chicken around:
A Closer Look At The Science Behind Gimbals
I will not pretend to be an expert on the physics that goes into a gimbal, but I can at least give you the lowdown.
Any physical object can rotate in 3 dimensions: pitch, yaw, and roll. If you are familiar with adjusting camera tripods, you will probably experience adjustments in all three axes to get that perfectly lined upshot.
A shaking camera will have random unwanted movement in all three axes. However, it is possible to effectively counteract those movements by producing activities in the opposite direction. Essentially, we do the exact opposite pitch, yaw and roll movements, and voila; we have a perfectly stable camera.
That is not rocket science, but how can we produce those exact countermovements? Modern-day technology, of course.
In a motorized gimbal, inertial measurement units or IMUs immediately send movement data to a computer, which calculates how much countermovement is needed in each axis.
Of course, sometimes the cameraperson will deliberately tilt the camera. The computer, therefore, uses advanced heuristic algorithms that can tell when the movement was deliberate or not. Pretty neat, right?
2-Axis and 3-Axis Gimbals
Most gimbals will either be 2-axis or 3-axis gimbals. You can probably guess that a 3-axis is superior. However, a 3-axis gimbal is more expensive, and the difference the extra pivot makes might not be enough to warrant the additional cost.
A two-axis gimbal corrects a camera that is pitching forward and back or rolling from side to side. It won’t correct unwanted movements in the yaw axis. On the other hand, a three-axis gimbal does correct unwanted shake in the yaw axis, resulting in even more stable footage.
When you are recording videos, you will likely have some ability to reduce camera shake, especially on one axis. So A 2-axis gimbal is perfectly adequate for a lot of purposes.
A 3-axis gimbal has its downsides. It has an extra pivot, meaning it weighs more. That is an especially big downside if you want to use it with a camera drone, where a heavier load can reduce the drone’s flight time. A 3-axis gimbal also has an extra motor. The extra engine means more battery consumption by the gimbal, and hence a shorter battery life.
How To Stabilize Video Using A Gimbal
Using a gimbal is very easy. Once set up, it does all the hard work of stabilizing for you, so the difficult part is finding something interesting to film.
However, in the beginning, at least, there will be some complications. Firstly, you need to choose the right gimbal for your camera.
If you’re using a GoPro or iPhone, a small handheld gimbal can be used. iPhone gimbals can typically also house GoPros thanks to their adjustable clamps, although a GoPro gimbal will have more direct compatibility. I’ve done extensive testing and made lists of what I rate to be the best gimbals for iPhones and best gimbals for GoPros.
If you want to use a gimbal with your DSLR or video camera, on the other hand, you’re going to need a much bigger one. These bigger gimbals will, of course, also cost a lot more. Here is my list of the best gimbals for DSLR.
Once you’ve got your gimbal, you’ll follow the instructions to attach your GoPro/phone/DSLR/video camera to it, and you’re pretty much set. Just be aware that the gimbal is designed only to cancel out those really small movements and not bigger ones. For example, if you’re climbing the stairs, the entire camera will be moving up and down. If you don’t want that, you will still need to keep the camera moving upwards in a smooth line purposefully.