The result was tragically predictable - the monopod tumbled about 8 feet to the ground, and landed with one of the cameras head-first taking the full impact. We made the mistake of attempting a midnight moonless night shoot, putting the monopod and plate rig in an elevated flower pot. One note about the monopod arrangement here - it’s a little top-heavy, so make sure that when setting the monopod up that it’s on a flat, stable surface. However, lining up the cameras carefully with a caliper/micrometer pays off in that the amount of “other camera” each other camera “sees” can be minimized, which makes “rig removal” or inpainting in post production much easier: It’s better to match the settings, and shutter as much as possible.Īnother interesting property of this rig is that it’s fairly forgiving of alignment - the individual cameras take care of most of the stiching and camera removal. Mismatches can be corrected in post-production… up to a point. I’d suggest using two of the exact same model phone so the app performance and latency is identical - because you’re going to need to hit the shutter button at the exact same time on both, whether doing timelapse still images at 16Mpel or video at 2Mpel. To take stereoscopic VR photos or video with this rig will require two phones or tablets, each connected to one of the two camera WIFI access points.
Now, with the mounting plate you can directly twist this on to any standard tripod mount or any other 12/20 - in this case, to show how light and flexible this rig is, we mounted it on a the selfie stick ( Smatree® SmaPole Q3) mentioned in Part 1: To set this rig up you need the 3×1 Fairburn multiplate and two 12/20 screws (provided in the kit, amongst many other things you’ll never think you need until you need them), and a Phillips screwdriver to put it all together, arranged like so: We used a Fairburn 3×1 multiplate (the little plate at the bottom left) for what you’ll see next… and yes, it all barely fits in the case (except for the digital micrometer, it has its own case): The focus chart is useful since we’re shooting at very high resolution - 5376×2536, more than 4K for each camera. We also added some tools, step rings, a bunch of Israeli arms/articulating arms and a focus chart. This kit is awesome for when you want to marry things together that normally wouldn’t go together, and when you want to experiment. The most important thing to note here is that this is a customized extension of a Fairburn Multiplate Kit (available at ) - Sean Fairburn puts together some great, very clever and well-thought-out kit.
In the third part we’ll cover what we did to take aerial VR 360 with it on a DJI Inspire 1 drone.įirst, our camera “accessory tool bag” is quite elaborate:
To continue this three part series, where in the first part we covered the Ricoh Theta S camera system, in this second part of the series we’ll show how we married two of these together to form up a stereoscopic VR rig, and the post-processing steps needed.