We have been making full motion video home tours for about three years. From the beginning, we decided to do "reality tv" style tours where the camera follows the agent around the home as the agent points out the important features. This REALLY shows off the home and the real estate agent, and with remote microphones, there are no wires to trip over. After making four or five of them, I began to get the knack of it, and now we can complete a tour with about an hour or so of video shooting.
The big difficulty with doing this kind of work is stabilizing the camera. It's one thing to plop the camera on a tripod with video head and pan the room. It's another to have it following the agent around the home. The latter means that you have to have some sort of stabilizing technology or the camera image will be bouncing around. (Note: Canon has done some amazing work with in-camera image stabilization with some of its higher end cameras.)
We began by doing hand-held camera work. This meant that the video shoots took a long time as there were a lot of retakes and the camera was unsteady. John solved that problem by finding a stabilization rig on the Internet made from parts from Home Depot. Using a bunch of pipes, nuts, bolts, and a five pound dumbbell weight, John made his own stabilization weight. IT WAS AMAZINGLY good, and only cost around $15 to make. We eventually decided to stop using it for two reasons: 1) Clients thought "that looks weird" when they saw a $5000 camera sitting on top of $15 junk parts; and 2) after an hour or two of holding it with his right arm, John's back would ache for days. Suffice it to say, the weight of the camera, pipes and dumbbell were putting a lot of strain on his back.
John began to look at other stabilization systems. The Steadicam systems looked great, but he found out that they are: 1) expensive; 2) difficult to learn how to control; and 3) bulky (discussed later). Instead he bought a 3 axis stabilization unit from Glidecam. It was a lot cheaper, and the promotion video looked impressive, but John could not make it work. The camera would drift and it was very difficult to make it do what he needed it to do. It sits in our garage cabinet. (Anyone want a barely used Glidecam?)
Then John found out about the Fig Rig. This is an INCREDIBLY SIMPLE piece of technology. Basically, it's a steering wheel made out of aluminum (he thinks) with a video mount in the middle. Just grab on with two hands and drive the camera around the room! It's amazing how stable things get when you have two hands spread out like that. He can point it up, down, etc. In addition, he bought a control button for the camera (connected by a wire and plug), and the control button sits right under his thumb. This allows him to turn the camera on and off and zoom in and out without moving his hand off the steering wheel. Click here to see the rig and accessories at Adorama.
The thing that John says is really great is that it allows him to get into tight spaces. He can be walking around the dining room furniture while I'm walking around on the other site narrating about the room and the rig isn't banging into stuff. Compare that to a Steadicam rig with an arm! Or I can walk up to a narrow bathroom door and he can walk up past me, slip into the bath, film it, and turn and catch me on the way out as we continue down the hall to the next room. Anyway, you get the idea.
The last thing that John has done to customize the rig is to use on the supplied clamps to clamp his quick disconnect tripod release onto the rig. This allows him to quickly connect the entire rig to the tripod so that he can shoot pans without having to remove the camera from the rig and remount it on the tripod. PLUS, if he REALLY needs to add camera stability due to a need to walk over a rough surface, he will collapse the tripod but leave it attached to the rig. This adds bottom weight like our old pipe thing.
Cost: A few hundred dollars.
RECOMMENDATION: If you are trying to take your video to the next level by doing full blown home tours, this is a GREAT tool to get you there.
Margaret Hokkanen, Carlsbad Real Estate
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