Sean - I was lucky enough to find a bearing big enough to support my crane and worked around it.

Like the Kessler crane, there are two flat bars that support both the crane on the tripod and the camera on the arm. I simply attached the bearing to the bottom of the flat bar facing the tripod and it works great.

Try to find a scrap metal junk yard. Normally industral junk yards will have all sorts of stuff like that. But good luck finding one that will come off easy :) Bring a hammer...

Andrew - That crane is pretty crazy. I would have never thought to hoist the camera operator into the air.. But I imagine that gives you several advantages in omnidirectional rotation.

Do you normally have a tripod on that platform or do they just hold the cameras?

Terry,

This is the one I use it is low res I use it just for framing.
http://varizoom.com/products/monitors/vztft7.html

Another that I considered.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...Mountable.html

Bill

crazy crane
 

Heya Terry,

Its funny that a ride-on crane would be so unthinkable. I mean, I know where you are coming from, but from a historical perspective, NOT putting the cameraman on the end of the crane is a relatively recent thing.

Te old hollywood crane had two, sometimes 3 seats on it. One for the cameraman, one for the focus puller and sometimes even one for the director. If you've seen a movie made before 1990, you've seen the results of a ride-on crane. And even since then, they still have a place. I bought my crane off a professional grip who last used it for a couple second unit shots on King Kong... go figure.

There is a center column, like a fixed "bazooka" mount that has a euroboss connector on the top. Originally that would have been connected to a 150mm bowl adapter (film rigs can be CRAZY heavy), but I had a 75mm bowl adapter machined so i could use my lowly miller ds10 head on it. Basically your seats pivot around a center column where the camera is mounted. There is something really tactile and nice about being with the camera as it moves around. You certainly have more freedom to improvise and to see shots out of the corner of your eye that you cant with a robot crane. The downside is that it takes at least 2 people to operate, ideally 3+. We've been playing around with the camerman holding a steadicam merlin. That adds even more organic control, but of course a whole nother level of complexity.

In the end, having a giant crazy crane isnt the most practical for industrial videos. (although i still use it for that.) My main goal in purchasing the crane... well, my main goal was to get the matthews dolly. The crane was almost a freebie on top of the price of the dolly, but anyways, my main goal was to do wannabe indy films. And frankly, I think wannabe indy films are more fun with a bunch of people hands on and some danger involved. hehe.

The nicest thing about a ride-on crane... inertia. once you get it going, its a big heavy balanced thing that wants to be very smooth. Its almost impossible to make a shot jerky or bouncy when you have that much weight involved. Yay physics!

cheers,
-a

Made this Lightweight crane for my HV20
 

I just fashioned this light weight crane/jib that will extent about 12 to 13 feet last weekend, for use with a light camera and perhaps Letusadapter.
Uses a heavy umbrella stand as base, upright is piece of sewer pipe over an umbrella poll. On the cap at end of sewer pipe, I mount a caster swivvel from about a 5 inch caster wheel. Took the wheel out, but actually used it as a friction device for the camera up and down direction adjustment. Bought u- brackets and some hardware from Home Depot to mount the swivvel and the camera up/down adjuster.

Made boom from aluminum tubing. Everything is sitting in picture, on a standard cheap handtruck/dolly truck..

ooh could I bother u to include a closeup photo?? I cant figure it out very well.. thanks for the help!

I imagine it will be difficult to use a Letus adapter on a crane. You will have to build a support platform long enough to accomodate for the support rods holding the Letus.

I've noticed everyone has tires instead of a track. I would assume that this would make the entire crane wobbly. What are your comments?

As soon as I visit the people building the crane, I will take a pic of the entire crane and a close up of the bearings to post.

Andrew - you are ofcorse right. Thank you for the information. I actually do not know much about film. I am just starting and have little knowledge of its history. I have been an anthropology student for 5 years with no experience with a camera other than a little home movie camera..

You said something about the crane's weight. Would it be ideal to have a heavy crane? Talking in terms of the actual crane arm itself or the track in which it is mounted to?

First, I did not envision shooting while moving the crane. But I will try some tests this weekend to see what it does. My intentions was that this be for a stationary shots, and mount on dolly was only for easy of moving. That umbrella stand is very heavy.

As to Letus, I use the 35a. It can be shot without rods, though I will have no problem adding a lightweight support for it from scrap aluminum....

heavy crane
 

heh. Well. Thats a bit subjective.

I think during a shot, it is ideal to have a really heavy crane and arm and track. However, all the time leading up to the start of the shot and immediately after you stop recording, you want the crane and track to be as light and small as possible. hehe.

Its all relative, really. If you have a lightweight pocket crane then you wont mind carrying up to a shoot on a 3rd floor. With my 300lb crane, you are either gonna have to come up with a ton of money or a freight elevator for me to drag it up to the top. There is probably some sweet spot between my heavyass crane and some flimsy jiggle crane where its transportable yet stable.

But again, my crane is more of a fun/hobby thing than anything else.

Here's my DIY 2x2 pine crane on a skater dolly we built from the DJTV plans ( http://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/seg...searchid=30594 ). As you can see, it's being steered with a pinky :) I stabilized the footage as it was taken with a Point and Shoot digital still cam...didn't bother zooming in to hide the black edges though:

http://www.yafiunderground.com/Video/dollycrane-sm.mov

Here's a video of how the crane was put together...I've since replaced the tripod with an old samson tripod and a lazy susan bearing:

http://www.yafiunderground.com/Video/BTS_Crane.mp4

A few pictures of our crane... Cammate 2000 series. Simply Awesome.

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...1/IMGP4512.jpg
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...1/IMGP7479.jpg
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...1/IMGP4152.jpg
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...1/IMGP3508.jpg
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...1/IMGP3400.jpg
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...1/IMGP3374.jpg

How much was everything including taxes?

nearsightedproductions.com