Dope Tech: Camera Robots!

Hey what's up guys mkbhd here? You've probably seen a rolling

camera

move something like that, or maybe you've seen some kind of slow, arcing panning shot. These are all quite common. How about something more complicated for that? I'm going to need something a little sillier, what's up guys, mkbhd here and welcome back to Dope Tech for this one. We flew to Portland, Oregon, home of motorized precision to check out some

robots

, but not just any

robots

, this is what I would call cinema. robots and as someone who likes videos, this is absolutely cool

tech

nology, so as I explained in the intro, there are all kinds of stabilizers and video tools and things like that to help a human move a

camera

a certain way. way and, in fact, in most shots. you can tell what kind of device is being used, like this rolling camera for shots, this would be a steadicam camera, this is clearly a slider and this is a crane, but you've probably seen some crazy shots in a movie or in a music video somewhere.

For a shot like this the answer is Kira Kira has been responsible for tons of shots in commercials for

tech

products and car videos etc. and you may not even realize it, but those are shots that are not cgi but are super precise and difficult. a human could never use the tools that exist now, hence the name motorized precision and then the level of

dope

technology is actually twofold here is the hardware with the real robots and mp studio, the software to control what They make these robots and they can make a Here's the rundown, so the Kira robot itself is all metal, extends up to nine feet tall, has a pair of fully articulated axles, and can move up to nine feet per second at any time. steering while carrying up to 40 pounds and then the robot is controlled with an xbox controller that has enough buttons to press each axis so that it goes forward and backward, up and down, turn left and right, tilt up and tilt down and even rotate clockwise or counterclockwise and once you have set the position you can move the robot through space and time to other positions with keyframes in the mp studio software and also, if you are using a manual lens (which you are probably doing at this point), there are motorized gears that are also part of the robot that can control the focus. iris and zoom during camera movement and also if you are shooting with a red camera that is also connected to the robot, not only do you get a live preview of what you are pointing at and you have a remote start stopping, but you also get all the red rock controls so you can change the resolution, shutter speed, compression ratio, white balance etc, then you hit record, start rolling in camera and run the kira and play the movement you made at the speed you want. chosen and then like I said, it can go very slow and smooth or it can go fast, it can be difficult to appreciate how fast three meters per second really is, but it is really fast, you have to know exactly what you are doing to keep it safe and, Of course, the other advantage of knowing exactly what you're doing is that all the shots you can do with it, the movements you can do are almost literally endless, so shout out to Sean Brown, the CEO of Powered Precision, for showing me all.

This shows me the ins and outs of the software and gives me some examples of what the robot can do, so the only thing left to do now is shoot with it, so that's what we did first on orbit takeover, so it's funny, it's just a bunch of keyframes highlighting different parts from different angles of the same subject and at each point the camera stops and we made sure that keyframe also had the subject perfectly in focus and the end result looks ridiculous , as if it could be seen almost like that. cgi, the motion blur only depends on the shutter speed we choose, but it's super real and then behind the scenes you can see all the hinges working, all the cables connected to the camera directly to the robot talking to the computer.

It's pretty amazing if you do it. Ask me next, we did a little more traditional shot, like a phone on a table, which you've seen before, but with a twist, look at this one, oh yeah, okay, so this one started out slow like a normal sliding shot like you. What you've seen before, but then moved quickly and focused the phone camera, you can probably imagine doing something like this with some moving graphics or some pointers followed over and over again showing the precision of the robot in being able to focus instantly and not You can forget that the shot can also be repeated as many times as you want, so you can do it multiple times with different phones, different elements, stack the clips, alter the opacity, etc.

It's crazy but for me the beauty is how close the entire platform sits on the table without touching it and there are no worries because there is no shake or wobble at all, super precise. Well this one was pretty simple but still if you saw it on a video you might be blown away but it depends on the The top spins around and then goes down the other side and I even think if I had more time with it we could doing all of this as a continuous motion so that you floated over the top of the laptop, spun non-stop, and then came. down on the other side, but still I'm pretty sure that's almost impossible without this robot and then we decided to do something a little more difficult, okay that was sick, but the challenge here what really makes this more difficult is the fact that I am a human being, not a robot, and it is actually very difficult for me to stay in front of the phone in exactly the same place for long enough so that we can set all the keyframes and the robot can do the movement and focus the phone every time. time, so there are actually a lot of shots that we didn't use that ended up with the phone being a little out of focus because I had moved, but I think getting this one right made it a lot more impressive and then last but not least a slightly different robot also made with motorized precision this one is called mia instead of kira it's a little lighter a little smaller uh but still equally impressive we could probably fit something like this in our studio wink wink but it's also available a huge motorized tracking system, so we did a little walking tracking shot, so obviously it's equally amazing for the little time we had to play with it and set it up, you know, matching my speed to the gliding speed of the robot to the walking and then stopping in the right place so that it goes over my head instead of through it is obviously worth it, so that's it, that's the beauty of precision motorized robots that control and hold cameras that can perform motion movements. low or high speed precisely like humans literally.

Obviously you can't take this to the next level if you have a slow motion camera, like if you imagine a phantom flex on this arm moving super fast, the shots you could get are absolutely incredible. and again, if you can't subscribe to the mp studio software, there are older iterations of this same type of robot control where you literally have to enter coordinates into an excel spreadsheet to get a robot to move like this, so obviously this is much better. generally people don't buy these robots, they rent them for certain sessions, like the commercials and music videos we talked about, but let me know what you would use a robot like this for, anyway, that's it, hey Kira, do you matter if Let's do this outing together, so we'll just say goodbye, done, thanks for watching the guys talk to you next time, peace.