Tony's Handheld Long Lens Zoo Trip Failure Montage

[@bestcameralens]

Wow, great job! It's looking great. Active stabilisation is a useful feature for handled shots like this. A monopod/tripod would be useful as well.

[@TonyDae]

Thanks, I appreciate that. I had OIS on with my lens but it was pretty difficult still to get shots without jitters. I ended up adding more stabilization in post and motion blur for those jittery OIS moments.

[@theflowowl]

How tha f*** is this handheld footage so stable ? Do the camera and lens have image stabilization? With my bmpcc I struggle a lot with the shakiness even though I use a Canon 24-105 with IS. After some minutes my arms start acting crazy with fatigue. Your footage actually looks very good!!!

[@TonyDae]

Thank you, I appreciate that. There is a lot of footage I didn't cut in because either I or the OIS had a hard time settling without some rocky dips when I followed action or tried to hold steady. Some of the problems are visible as micro jitters and bumps here or there but I attempted to mitigate that in post where possible. To my knowledge, IBIS does not work in conjunction with the longer lenses on the Sony. It was especially hard considering I shot 24p and not 60p which likely would have provided smoother images, but I wanted the max quality file since the camera I used has junk 60p. What I did was turn OIS mode 1 on, which is intended for steady (instead of lateral movement) shooting with the Sigma 100-400. When possible I rested my arms on a rail, but I could not most of the time. I also kept the camera up to my eye with the viewfinder to create a third point of contact, elbows kept at a narrow angle for added stability. In post I added image stabilization in resolve with the default "translation" setting. This generally fixes the worst movement, but won't fix the jitters you will notice as a result from the lens getting knocked around. I also added, in the noise reduction node at the head of the pipeline, a tiny bit of motion blur to help mitigate the distracting micro jitters when they did occur.

[@suhaib2789]

Do you bring up a white balance card with you?

[@TonyDae]

On paid shoots I do. For this I was lazy and in a rush since the park was closing. Just shot in the daylight or cloudy WB then adjusted for visible whites/grays in post where I could.