FreeFly Movi is a new super-powered gimbal that turns your phone into a movie-making machine
The smartphone you carry every day in your pocket is becoming a more and more advanced camera, and if you are willing to learn the ins and outs of video making, you hardly need an expensive camera to produce a cinematic video that would look great.
What you do need for that, though, is a bit of extra stability. Even with optical image stabilization and advanced digital stabilizing algorithms, phone cameras are still not capable of making perfectly smooth videos.
Freefly, a company that makes professional stabilizing video gear for big cameras, has just come up with a solution for your phone: the new Freefly Movi.
A stabilizer much like the popular DJI Osmo Mobile, the Freefly Movi does most of what the Osmo can do, but it hides a couple of neat tricks up its sleeve. First, it's very well designed: you can easily take it low to the ground, you can easily use it with two hands for extra precision and you can easily just let it stand on its own when you are not using it. Apart from these three key handling advantages, the Movi also has a very easy phone clamp that allows mounting any phone - even super wide ones - very easy.
A super-powered phone gimbal
But the Freefly Movi really shines with an iPhone - not surprising given Apple's stand in the creative community - it has a dedicated app that allows a lot of smart camera movement. You have the Majestic camera mode that allows you fine control over stabilization: you can fine tune it for your phone camera to ignore your movement completely, or adjust to it gradually, and how gradually. A slower movement would be best fitting for those cinematic-style shots, while slightly faster movements would be suitable to track fast action.
The Movi also has a useful Echo mode that allows for some complex movements. You can teach Movi a complex movement, so that you can mount it on a thing like a slider and get camera movement while on the slider. This would allow some smooth object tracking on a cheap slider and could possibly save you a lot of money that you would otherwise spend on a pricey slider.
You also have a timelapse mode with movement so that the world is flying by, a movilapse mode which is a timelapse on the go (when you mount your phone with Movi on a car or a bike) that requires even smoother looking footage.
Finally, you also have a smartpod mode where the Movi acts a bit like a tripod and ensures your phone camera stays locked in one position and you also have the option for easy orbit shots with your subject locked in frame as the camera moves.
All of that goodness costs $300, can be pre-ordered now and ships in the second quarter of 2018.
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: