Video shots with side-arm tripod and OSMO gimbal cellphone holder

There's a lot to unpack in today's blog title. Here's a video about it. I've been doing a lot of video editing and photography lately, so it's on my mind. Last week I watched a clinic presented by Craig Symington, a beloved columnist for the Narrow Gage and Short Line Gazette, and he shared that he used two side-arm tripods to get his camera deep into his layout, and to get lights where he needed them. I went and bought one, which is actually called an "Impact LS-CB6 Combo Boom Stand", and tried it out. I like it. It allows me to position a camera or light fixture right over the layout, and as low as needed to get to eye-level view without touching the actual surface of the layout.

For model railroad videos, you often want to pan the shot to follow a locomotive. This can be awkward while reaching over the layout, so I decided to try my OSMO Mobile 3 gimbal cellphone mount's auto-tracking feature to see how well it would automatically track a train. You can see the results on my video linked above, but the bottom line is that it didn't do too well for a quickly moving train close up, but it might be ok pulled further back, or with a slow back and forth switching activity. I've ordered a 3-axis camera mount to put on the boom stand, so I'll be able to try comparing manual tracking with the auto-tracking that the OSMO provides.

One of the challenges of the operations-oriented model railroad videos that I've been making lately is you have to simultaneously operate the locomotive, uncouple cars, fuss with car cards (in front of the camera) AND pan the camera to keep up with the train's motions. It's a bit much. I'm hoping the auto-tracking of the OSMO will give me a little relief.

Craig has said that he uses two of these side-arm tripods - one for a still camera, and one for extra lighting where needed. I don't know yet if I'll go that far. I do know that it makes sense to put one cellphone on a regular tripod in the middle of the room to shoot my overall setup, while simultaneously using the side-arm for close-up video of the train action. Stay tuned, we'll see how well it goes.

If you haven't seen my series of operations-oriented videos, watch them here.