During the past several months we've had several inquiries concerning ways to get a more stabilized shot from helicopters and other less-than-steady platforms. I came across a place called Kenyon Labs (http://www.ken-lab.com/) in a photo mag article. They make a variety of gyroscopic stabilizers for use with cameras and have been doing so for a very long time. The gyros are certainly not light or inexpensive. But if you have the need and the budget it looks like they'll fill the bill.

I know that several months ago our Charles Papert has remarked about using a gyro somewhere here, too.

I always wondered about that idea. Thanks for posting it.

I noticed that in practial application each camera gets a treatment of 2 or even 3 of those things! So I'd guess that each little "football" houses two weighted wheels which spin in opposite directions to each other... so if you want pitch and yaw control of your camera then you'd need at least 2. I always wanted to try to build something like this... If you had a gyro system on a monopod I'll bet you could get amazing stabilized shots. It would come down to what's cheaper... a well-developed gyro or the high quality stabilizer rigs available today.

For a home-builder I'd expect a gyro system to actually be cheaper and easier to build. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems like the balance and pivot issues would be partially eliminated.

They aren't cheap but they certainly work wonders! We periodically do custom 2000 Pro sleds with Kenyon Gyro's....

http://www.glidecam.com/gyro-ks4.html
http://www.glidecam.com/gyro-ks8.html