How fragile are OIS and IBIS mechanisms?

[kye]

My recent hobby is riding my electric scooter around the place for Little Camera Tests, and I've contemplated mounting a camera to the scooter to get some zoom-zoom shots, but also just to get a smartphone mount to be able to have navigation or whatever open.

The challenge is that the scooter has zero suspension, and footpaths / sidewalks are not even remotely smooth.  The bumps ripple up the handlebars with almost infinite transmission and actually make my wrists sore from the severity of the bumps.  I'm forced to drop down curbs etc occasionally too, so that's a massive jolt as well.

1) is mounting a smartphone (iPhone) a reasonable idea?

2) what about an IBIS mechanism like the GX85?

[leslie]

i have seen a contraption that was part lever, part spring that allowed some up / down movement  to help smooth things out. Not sure where i saw it now.  Maybe you best bet could be a chest mount for the iphone. Your body will naturally help to dampen things out with a chest mount. You see a lot of helmet mounted gopros and on  chest mounts on motor bikes, i presume they already tried mounting it to bikes,  but didn't like the results. I know the loam ranger swears by quark stabilizers on a chest mount  but their usa and i have not seen them out here. 

I'm messing around with a ratcheting travel bar between the car seats with a crane m2 bolted on to it for stabilization. However a car is a slightly different proposition   🙄

[leslie]

Er i cant see mounting anything to a scooter being conducive to longevity whether its a limb or camera. If your picking your spots to use it like an oversize slider that might work. But thrashing at the local skate park not so good. however if you do take it to the local  skate park well i'd like to see the footage of that. 😎

[BTM_Pix]

18 minutes ago, leslie said:

i have seen a contraption that was part lever, part spring that allowed some up / down movement  to help smooth things out. Not sure where i saw it now. 

I think you might be referring to a z axis stabiliser add on ?

I did this quick test of the Ulanzi one for my Osmo Pocket here.

It certainly helps with the bobbing when walking with an Osmo Pocket so also helps with other types of shots where there would be unwanted up/down motion.

It can be modified easily enough for an iPhone but whilst its good (and tuneable) for controlling the unwanted motion, I'm doubtful how useful it would be with more extreme cases.

 

[kye]

@leslie @BTM_Pix

I don't care about getting stabilised shots - I care about not shaking the camera literally to death - to the point that the OIS / IBIS mechanism stops working and the camera becomes unusable.  

The severity of the vibrations are unlike anything I can think of, except perhaps amusement park rides, and even then this would be a pretty harsh one.

 

[BTM_Pix]

To be fair @kye I was answering @leslie question about what it was he had seen.

And also saying that it would not be sufficient to cope with that amount of movement you are describing which by extension would not be able to protect the camera.

Back in the mists of time when dinosaurs and DJI Phantoms without integrated cameras roamed the earth, we all used a product called MoonGel to try and offset the vibrations coursing through the direct mount to the GoPro.

MoonGel was originally a dampening solution for drums and when placed between the drone and the mount was quite effective in reducing the jellovision produced by the GoPro getting vibrated to within an inch of its life during flight.

If you are fashioning/modifying a mount for the scooter then you might want to look at incorporating a similar solution to reduce the vibration transmitted to the camera.

With regard to the GX85, the big danger will come if you ride along without the camera being powered at any point as without power the sensor will be left to flop about which will potentially cause a problem.

Worth remembering that the GH5s came about in large part, apparently, because shows such as Top Gear wanted an IBIS-free version of the GH5 to deal with the vibration issues shooting in cars causing a problem with the image of the IBIS version so if you have got a non-IBIS camera then I would probably look at that as an option.

[projectwoofer]

I don’t trust the IBIS in my GX85 that much any more. I had a problem with it moving when the camera sits stable even when off that I documented before in another thread here. That was fixed with a firmware update that I somehow had missed but to my disappointment the IBIS sometimes does that even now. Not so pronounced as before but it does it unexpectedly and I found others have had this problem with their GX85s so I don’t think it’s my specific camera but rather a general problem. 

[ND64]

OIS or IBIS have almost no problem dealing with severe vibrations. Their killer is dust. Even if your lens is "weather sealed", its not immune to dust. Stabilizer being on lens or sensor, use very tiny metal balls lubricated by a special oil, to move smoothly. If that oil contaminated by environment particles, it loses its required viscosity, and the result is jumpy moves. 

[Michael S]

1) If the vibrations are high frequency enough, you will still get the jello effect, even with the tiny sensors. I would not expect any damage though as there are no moving parts in the iphone.

2) All Ibis units have hard limits on their range of movement and I'm quite sure if you yank them to their limit hard enough and often enough something will break eventually. These systems were not designed for violent movements, there is no mechanical dampening or absorption when they reach the limits of their range, just loud clicks. I would not risk my camera at it unless I would be ok with breaking it anyway.

Maybe you could get creative with something like this: https://www.proaim.be/collections/shock-absorbing-systems like this photographer: https://radpowerbikes.eu/blogs/the-scenic-route/a-rad-setup-for-ebiking-photographers

If you happen to know any farmers, they are usually also quite good at creatively putting together some mechanized contraptions.

 

 

[leslie]

On 7/20/2022 at 10:39 AM, kye said:

@leslie @BTM_Pix

I don't care about getting stabilised shots - I care about not shaking the camera literally to death - to the point that the OIS / IBIS mechanism stops working and the camera becomes unusable.  

The severity of the vibrations are unlike anything I can think of, except perhaps amusement park rides, and even then this would be a pretty harsh one.

 

 i think, maybe launching a space shuttle might top your list.  🚀

while stabilized shots isn't the main concern it  cant hurt either.

Short of making something amateurish, which would  in turn add to the size, weight,  ectara,  ectara  of the thing and perhaps not solve the problem. I eliminated the scooter as a mount from the equation  right from the start. Anything bigger than a go pro or  an i phone would probably become  a problem or a missile in short order and the human body already does an amazing job of smoothing things out. Use that instead. 

While i am a fan of the jason bourne movies i'm not really a fan of the action sequences. Its nearly as exhausting to watch as it was to film no doubt. I'm like a couch ninja, ducking and weaving 🙄

Still i think your best option is a  small mechanical stabilizer  it would take a lot of the abuse and when it hits the limits not crash like a 3 axis motor would. I made a pendulum gopro mount for my kite. You know those things that predate drones. that did ok to smooth out the fluctuations when flying a kite.  

One last thought maybe get small pneumatic tires, that would help with vibrations and some bumps 

 

[leslie]

 while perusing youtube i may have stumbled across a solution. Its probably not cheap and it involves an aspect of diy but you could probably adapt it to a scooter .

i think you would still need to go easy on the gutters however. Some laws are immutable... 

 

[eatstoomuchjam]

This is basically just begging for a fairly modern GoPro or Insta360.  Lately, I've been using a GoPro mounted to my bumper and an Insta360 One R (Leica lens mod) on a rigid mount on my roof rack.  I drive a Wrangler which is definitely not known for a smooth ride - when I take it on really gnarly backroad trails, it's smooth to the point where it can be a bit disappointing (the footage no longer reflects just how bumpy the trail was).

I'd try a Hero 9 (or 10) and/or an Insta360 One R with a simple pole mount before spending too much time rigging up a crazy Z Axis or gimbal for your bigger camera.

[kye]

9 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

This is basically just begging for a fairly modern GoPro or Insta360.  Lately, I've been using a GoPro mounted to my bumper and an Insta360 One R (Leica lens mod) on a rigid mount on my roof rack.  I drive a Wrangler which is definitely not known for a smooth ride - when I take it on really gnarly backroad trails, it's smooth to the point where it can be a bit disappointing (the footage no longer reflects just how bumpy the trail was).

I'd try a Hero 9 (or 10) and/or an Insta360 One R with a simple pole mount before spending too much time rigging up a crazy Z Axis or gimbal for your bigger camera.

Yeah, I think you're right.  I have a small 1080p action camera that would be pretty good so that's my current best plan.  I could either mount it to the scooter or maybe get a mount for my helmet, which would be stable and more likely to be remotely level too.

One thing I really like about the hypersmooth stabilisation on the latest action cameras is that when you mount them to a vehicle or something they aren't locked to the vehicle, so you see it moving around in response to the terrain (smoothly of course) but it's a nice effect I think.  Can you turn the stabilisation on your cameras down to a lower setting perhaps?  Not sure if that's something that's available?

[leslie]

i have the gopro 9, fairly confident the stabilization is either on or off. I have not seen an option to lower the effect.

One thing to be aware of is when you use the stabilization it cuts into your frame width, depending on how bad the shake is you can lose a bit of real estate. i grabbed the following off a web site because i'm lazy at explaining things. 

But there’s a quirk that’s worth knowing about: when you’re shooting in the Wide field of view, you’ll end up with a slightly cropped imaged and lose some of the image around the edges. With the HERO6 Black, it’s about 5% of the image. With the HERO5 models, even more is cropped–about 10%. And because the Wide FOV is the default, it’s something you might run into often. With newer models with even more aggressive HyperSmooth stabilization, it can use even more of the frame for its stabilization buffer.

Other software stabilization options, like those in Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro, do the same thing. That’s because the way they work needs to cannibalize space from the edges of the frames in order to follow the rest of the frame smoothly.

Cropping vs Zoom

The cropping we’re talking about here isn’t technically the same thing as when we talk about cropping with still images in that it’s not actually making the dimensions of the final product smaller.

As an example, without stabilization, the 4K footage comes out of a GoPro with dimensions of 3840×2160. It will come out with exactly the same dimensions when you turn on stabilization.

So what’s actually happening is really a digital zoom, with the camera’s processor interpolating to replace the missing information. In practice, the degradation of the image quality is more theoretical than visual–you really can’t see the difference, although it’s technically there.

Hope that helps.

[eatstoomuchjam]

Yup - that's mostly true.  The FOV is narrower by default with EIS enabled.  It doesn't bug me at all with action cameras because the lenses are usually wider than I want anyway.  One thing that is a bit iffy, though, is that you're saying that the GoPro applies a digital zoom in order to get to 3840x2160.  I have no insight to how GoPro actually do their EIS, but the resolution of the Hero 9 is 20 megapixels and the Hero 10 is 23.  Both cameras can shoot 5K video.  So in 4K mode with stabilization applied, it could be done by moving to a 1:1 pixel readout in a window and moving that window around the sensor.  That wouldn't be a digital zoom - it'd be more like "clear image zoom" on a Sony.  No need to upscale the footage.

The bigger objection that I tend to have with EIS is that it sometimes interacts really weirdly with rolling shutter/jello.  When on a sustained bumpy road (like something that's really washboarded) with my car-mounted stuff, sometimes the footage just looks like puke - it gets even worse once the sun starts to go down since the action camera starts to move closer to a 360 shutter to cope with the lack of light. 

Anyway, for city streets/sidewalks which aren't so bumpy, as long as the tires aren't made of hard plastic, I'd expect that they'd absorb enough of the vibration from sidewalk/asphalt texture that the footage will be in hyperlapse/uncanny valley too smooth mode (this is where I wish that more options were provided for less aggressive stabilization).