Smooth Shooting with Camera Sliders

For my next trick I’ve recently invested in trying to tweak out a camera slider.  What is a camera slider you ask? Imagine, if you will, an enormous Hollywood camera dolly sitting on a track and fluidly gliding through a scene capturing the action.  Now, imagine that I am not using a Hollywood-style 35mm film camera but rather a high definition digital single lens reflex (HDSLR) camera (the Canon Rebel T2i) and rather than walking through a scene with a steady cam or hand-held or sitting it on a tripod and panning, instead imagine that the camera is locked down to a fluid tripod head tightened down to a platform that is gliding along aluminum rails attached to a nice tripod base!  This is a camera slider.

What can I not do with a camera slider?
Well, I can’t slide around a large group of people or around a big scene. A dolly on a track can typically wrap around a scene and capture big scenes pushing in, out or around the moment. A slider is restricted to a shorter shot in a linear direction.  If you put a fluid tripod head on the slider platform, you can at least pan while you slide the camera along the linear rail to get a little more interesting motion, but this takes practice to nail down in a professional manner.

Well what can I do with a camera slider?
The slider affords me the ability to be as stable as when I have the camera secured to a tripod, but I get linear movement which makes for some very interesting high quality camera motion.  While I cannot spin around a big scene, I can push forward in a line or at angles, or slide sideways around a corner to reveal some action.  This is just another tool in an arsenal of capabilities I am amassing at the moment.  So far I have 2 nice fluid head tripods (one with an affixed head and one with a removable / swappable head), a Glidecam physical steady cam for taking shots on the run while maintaining a reasonable amount of stabilization, and now the tripod mountable camera slider. In terms of having a nice portable amount of camera movement and stabilization hardware, the only thing missing would be a stabilization vest to connect to the steady cam which currently costs around $2,000 so that isn’t going to happen any time soon.  On that topic, these HDSLR cameras like the T2i are so light that adding the vest doesn’t feel like a necessity at this point.

Once I got the basic hardware for setting up a camera slider
I started thinking through the basic principles of achieving a nice solid fluid shot and there seem to be two major factors in making a slider work.  First, you have to get good at sliding the base along the rails. This means learning how to exponentially increase the inertia of movement from completely still to moving and back down to still again at the other end of the shot. Getting the feel for this and optimizing the smoothness or the speed is still a bit of both art and science (and I have yet to fully master this, but I don’t expect it will take long). Next up is ensuring you have the slider base itself (the thing the rails are attached to) completely stabilized? To make this happen I sat with a co-worker thinking through the best way to connect the rails to a tripod.  After deliberating for a while I felt I needed to find a good metal worker to drill and thread a few holes. A few phone calls later I found a master who was working at a roofing company in Alexandria, VA. A phone call and an in-person visit later and he accepted the challenge. A few days after that I had the slider secured to the tripod in a manner that was incredibly stable and as well could be easily broken down for travel. Finding that craftman was a good decision!

Once it was all together and working I decided to take a few video shots tonight and I have to say I am pretty happy. To get a better idea about what camera slider footage looks like, take a look at the following video I just shot after assembling the modified camera slider. 

Something to note for those of you interested in doing a project like this: Presentation of slider footage is everything and not all delivery mechanisms are equal. 9 times out of 10 I prefer to put my footage on Vimeo, mostly because of the quality of work on Vimeo.  But Vimeo progressively downloads the video to your web browser, so the first time you watch it, the video may seem a little jerky.  Once you have watched it once, replay the video and it should seem more fluid.  The bottom line lesson here is that camera slider footage looks the best when it is nice and slow and played via a streaming service like youtube. So if you get into slider shoots the key in presenting the footage is that you either actually stream the footage or burn it to a DVD so you don’t get the progressive download jerkiness on initial playback. In any case, take a look at the footage below and after watching it once, run it again to see it a little smoother!

More to come with future projects and the camera slider!