Motorized pan/tilt (Bescor MP-101)
 

I've been interested in a motorized pan/tilt solution for a while and finally sprung for the Bescor MP-101. It handles the XH A1 well, but you probably wouldn't want to put anything much heavier on it.

There's a more detailed writeup on my blog here with links to some sample video taken with it.

The fast pan looks pretty awful, but that's not the fault of the Bescor. They are much smoother before compression. I need to practice a bit more, but I wouldn't do a pan as extreme as the ones shown in the video in any case. (More discussion of bad-looking pans from the A1 here.)

Bruce

I appreciate the review... I think I had rather put $130 towards a fluid head tripod set up.... I am sure it has good applications like a one man three camera wedding set up with preset positions...

Bescor MP-101 review
 

Thank you for the review! It's great to see an example of this head in action since I am considering it. I assume your example .mov is highly compressed for web delivery.

For what it is worth, I have never seen that much artifacting from my Sony HDV FX1 (1080i) in the native as-recorded HDV, even with faster pans. If I compress the video to a low bitrate, of course I do get artifacts. In addition to the blurry, patchy quality, on my computer, the motion of your PanTilt.mov example has a regular "hiccup" every 1 second which I assume is just my computer not being fast enough for smooth playback.

Looks like a nice item to have.