The Neewer Gimbal was a bit tricky to balance and starting with the wrong (helpful, but misguided) tutorial video did not help. I am eternally grateful to all the posters out there who make life easier for us all, but you still do have to be careful who you listen to.

I tend to prefer blog posts by women bloggers, as they are generally more realistic, less about ego and more to the point.

Well mostly.

With the Neewer gimbal, I watched a 22 minute long vlog post, that was very easy going and friendly viewing, but left me with a slight feeling of helplessness. The trick to balancing the gimbal, as I understood it from this video (which to be fair had a disclaimer at the end of something like “this is how we do it, please let us know if you know better”), was to;

1. Get the “drop” right, which is to say, use the right weights and stem length so that the gimbal, when held parallel, drops to straight in about 1.5 to 2.5 seconds. Too quick and it will “pendulum”. Too slow and it will have little incentive to regain its horizontal alignment when taken off of it. At about 2 seconds, it will allow reasonably fast movement to right itself, but not fast enough to want to swing when ever it is moved quickly….usually.

2. Once the drop is right, get the camera sitting straight by shifting it left/right or backward/forward using the base plate adjustments (this is the problematic bit).

3. You can also adjust the foot weights to fix front back unevenness.

4. Continue to adjust all of these until you are stable and the gimbal can be picked up from its sitting position without any discernible lean in any direction.

This took them about ten or more minutes to do and they (and I) found that when the drop test was completed, the camera tended to rotate. Mine usually went back and to the left, but when it settled, it did sit straight. the problem was, if balance needed to be re-adjusted, the same process had to be repeated over and over.

Ok I thought, such is life and off I went to my job with a well adjusted gimbal.

By the time I got to work (a short walk), the rig needed a slight adjustment and this took, as expected quite a while, with many, many micro shifts. I actually shot some footage, holding the handle of the gimbal at a slight angle to straighten it as I went. Not ideal, but it worked just enough to get the job done.

Later, I watched another tutorial about gimbal use, not brand specific or even about set up, just a general gimbal tutorial aimed at any user looking for tips and tricks for their best applications and one for people who it was assumed had their gimbals sorted. During the intro the magic words “centre of balance” were uttered and alarm bells started to ring loudly.

The video was dry, a little “masculine” and quite short at 5 mins, but it sure was to the point. I revisited my processes, starting with the pre mounting step of finding the cameras centre of balance, marking it on the plate and matching that with the little arrow on the gimbals top plate centre. I had missed this before. This is located directly over the gimbals stem.

Guess what?

The whole process was much easier and more consistent. It took roughly as long as the video, which ironically matched how long the other video and its process took in tandem. I also noticed that the drop test did not result in any rolling, the camera just settled straight and stayed that way.

The process is now;

1. Balance the camera and lens (!!!) on the base plate and mount it centred on the gimbal with the provided centre point marker.

2. Get the drop right, aiming for about a 2 second drop. As an aside, an EM1 with 8-18 or 12-40 only needs one of the smaller weights, front and back on the 24” Neewer carbon fibre gimbal.

3. Adjust the sliding base plate left/right to balance the camera and lens evenly.

4. Adjust the stem weights front and back to get forward and backward balance right if needed, but by centring the camera, this is basically sorted.

5. Done.

It seems that until the centre point is found, every adjustment tends to work against the next, making for a long and frustrating process of adjust, check, re-adjust, check, re-adjust check etc.

The moral of the story is, longer posts may not be the best option.

This is less important today than the other day as I have an Osmo Pocket coming, but it is still good to have options.